Origins of “Mega Damage” (an article: MD's nature & effe

[Dead Boy]

The Origins of “Mega Damage”

The term "Mega Damage" has been used in a contextual in-game form in the books more than a few times before, meaning that it is not only a game term for us players and GMs, but also it is in the popular vernacular of the inhabitants of Rifts Earth. This means that the pairing of those two particular words have a very specific meaning and definition other than, "does lots o’ damage". With this in mind, the following is the historical account of how this phrase came into being in the futuristic worlds and settings of The Golden Age of Man, Chaos Earth, and Rifts, (given their linear relation), as well as a brief explanation of how and why it works the way it does.

In the back half of the 21st century a new level of measure was applied to the growing number of energy weapons in US military use; the "Mega calorie", or "Mega cal" for short. The intention was to show the level of effectiveness the beam weapon would have against the flesh and bone of a Human being. The whole thing is based off the calculation that it would require 68 Million calories of energy to instantly heat a 100 kg (about 220 lbs.) person to the point of vaporization from the starting point of normal body temperature, (including phase changes). A weapon with only a single Mega cal rating could produce a million calories of energy and do horrific amounts of damage to an unprotected person. The new system was met with some acceptance but wasn't all that widely used beyond technical designations and statistics. In Europe, the system’s legitimacy wasn’t even acknowledged at all since the “calorie” was never accepted as part of the official metric system, despite its basis in SI values.

A few years later an enterprising weapons designer working for NEMA's R&D branch named Dr. Jason Hauck, (pronounced “Hawk”), had a brainstorm. Being an engineer, he loved the Mega cal system for its more practical applications above that of the more generalized metric Joule. But he also understood why the new system wasn’t all that popular outside of the occasional “nerd circles” like the people he normally associated with. Unless the reader knew the figures and ratios behind the rating, it was all techno-babble gibberish to them. What was needed was a simpler way to convey the same idea in words that would be readily understood with very little explanation. So what Dr. Hauck did was derive a simple conversion making 0.68 Mega cals in to 1.0 Mega Damage, signifying that 1 MD could instantly vaporize 1 kg of Human flesh, (starting from normal body temperature, 98.6*F / 37*C).

The idea was so simple and easy to grasp it was an instant hit. Soon enough all directed energy weapons in the US Military’s inventory capable of emitting enough energy to warrant it were given Mega Damage ratings, starting with the venerable Marine sidearm, the M-2011. In response to this, the armor used to protect both soldiers and vehicles alike were given counter-ratings that put their defenses in perspective with this new level of measure. Specifically they were assigned degrees of Mega Damage Capacity based on how much energy it took to breach their armor plates and cause significant enough damage to cease the unit’s functionality. For a vehicle this translated into how much it took on the average to cripple the machine. For soldiers it meant what it took to punch through their body armor and start vaporizing massive chunks of flesh and bone. After a while, virtually everyone forgot about the old Mega calorie system leaving it to be a footnote in the annals of history... annals which would soon be lost the ravages of The Great Cataclysm.

It didn’t take long before the military wanted to start assigning Mega Damage ratings to all their weapon systems for the sake of consistency. The problem was, not everything worked the same way. Ion blasters were the first to be translated into Mega Damage ratings because they work virtually identical to lasers, focusing wave/particle energy in a beam to rapidly heat the target, but instead of photons Ion weapons use electrons. Plasma stream weapons too were easy to convert even though a small part of their destructive force comes from a kinetic impact. It was with Particle beam weapons where the going got rough. Even though they have a similar superheating effect as lasers, particle beams are basically shotguns that shoot atomic and subatomic particles at near-relativic speeds (around 98% the speed of light), meaning that they also pack one hell of a kinetic punch. But when it came to Rail Guns, cutting Vibro weapons, and mechanical brute force, the original definitions of what would rate as 1 MD completely failed.

The problem persisted for a few months before it was brought back the man who came up with the Mega Damage scale, Dr. Hauck. The engineer thought about it for a few days and came back to the US Military with a simple answer. In order for the system to have a consistent meaning it had to have some kind of uniformity in concept. As such he proposed that these other weapons be strictly measured against their ability to puncture a series of armor plates that have been given a protection rating of exactly 1 MDC, which in turn is based on the original formula of vaporizing 1 kg of flesh for ever 1 MD of energy. It was a nice, neat package that made everyone happy.

So even though these “non-beam weapons” can penetrate an equal amount of armor as their energy beam counterparts do on a Mega Damage point per point basis, they are incapable of causing the true vaporization effect of a laser, ion, plasma weapon. Weapons like the particle beam hit like a combination of a plasma cannon and a mechanical fist, vaporizing flesh and blood while also punching straight through with sufficient force to cause additional equivalent effects. Rail guns on the other hand cause a little vaporization and a large amount of liquidation of flesh by converting some of their kinetic energy into thermal through friction. For the most part much of the damage they cause comes from the hypersonic slug pushing this vapor and liquid along its nose and shock wave, and dragging it along in the trailing vacuum, with the end result creating massive exit holes in the victim’s body. Mechanical brute force, like blows from a suit of power armor, require far more force and energy to penetrate the target than vibro blades or rail guns due to the fact that their strikes affect larger surface areas, (and thus also make wider holes). But they too are rated solely on their ability to punch through the 1 MDC test targets and not how much power they produce on a kg/cm2 basis. Vibro blades on the other hand use their repellent EM energy fields, (similar to that of atoms, but on the macro scale), to focus mundane amounts of physical energy against a vastly smaller surface area. As the EM energy edge is driven into the substance, forcibly parting molecules from each other along the stab or slice, the energy field begins to exert its repellent force laterally and effortlessly pries the target apart. This allows the one-electron-wide edge to work its way in ever deeper, making it laterally pry the surface apart wider, allowing it to go deeper, and wider, and deeper, and so on until the force of the attacker’s thrust is exhausted. So though each kind of weapon can penetrate an equal thickness of MDC rated armor, the effects of each are different and distinct, with each having their pros and cons.

Some had a hard time distinguishing the conceptual difference between a bullet-hole that goes straight through a person and the wound tract of a Mega Damage rated laser. A hole is a hole. Right? … WRONG! A modern day high-powered bullet will displace about a tenth of a kg of meat, (roughly a quarter pound), liquefying maybe 10% of that. In addition to that the bullet’s shock wave makes what is called a “Temporary Cavity” where the inside of the wound momentarily balloons up about ten to twenty times in diameter and then snaps back into shape. This violent motion causes additional tissue damage and bleeding in the surrounding area. This may be a potentially a lethal wound, but most of the meat is still in there giving a doctor something to work with to patch the injured soldier up. Alternately a laser that hits with a rating of 7 MD will vaporize 7 kg of tissue, (or a little over 15 lbs.). That translates into up to 7,000 cubic centimeters, (7 liters, or about 1.75 gallons), of flesh being vaporized, phased into a red mist! Considering that even a large person’s torso is about 40cm thick from chest to back, the radiant energy from the laser would create a hole in him that’s about 15cm wide, (approximately 6 inches), going all the way through! (Of course this is an ideal case and the hole may be smaller in diameter due to over-penetration of the laser shooting straight through the poor soul and not delivering all its energy.) If that weren’t bad enough, in addition to the hole there would be the vaporific effects as well from the expanding gases. Contrary to Star Trek ®, when people are vaporized they don’t just disappear. When water makes the transition from liquid to vapor it expands by a factor of about 200 times. Those 7000 cubic cm of meat would become around 1.4 cubic meters of red mist in terms of volume. Now Human tissue is amazingly stretchy stuff, and those two newly formed holes, front and back, will provide a place for all that vapor to escape… but still additional damage from this explosive expansion is sure to happen. At the very least there’ll be a spray of scorching hot red mist from the point of impact which may burn others and/or coat things in its path as condensation makes it turn back into a liquid. More likely, it would result a hail of chunks of meat and boiling blood spraying all over the place in gruesome fashion. Worst case scenario, the expanding gas can’t escape fast enough and the victim will explode with body parts flying everywhere, ranging from maybe just an arm, leg or head, to entire bisected torsos. (Note: Play the gruesomeness of these effects according to your tastes.) And all this from just a “dinky” 7 MD hit! Even more amazingly, people can still survive wounds such as these if medical assistance comes quickly enough, (see the Field Surgery skill).

While a laser beam will make a linear wound tract, streaming plasma weapons hit differently. Staying true with the rating system, a single point of mega damage will vaporize a single kilogram of body-mass, of course. But because the plasma is a directed stream of superheated “fluid”, (be it air drawn in from the atmosphere, water sucked in when submerged in lake, or whatever’s available), and not a focused beam, it hits completely differently. Where a laser digs in on one spot and radiates heat from that channel it creates, the plasma steam burrows at first, but then will spill out and over the ever-deepening point of impact. The star-hot gas will cloak a large portion of the victim’s exterior while “misting” out a large cavity in a person’s body at the same time. As such while the vaporization effect of the laser is more surgical, the plasma stream can more easily vaporize whole body parts. Particle beams on the other hand falls in between the two extremes of coverage of the laser and plasma attacks, making it a near-ideal jack of all trades.

Ion weapons may have been among the first to be given a MD rating along side lasers, they do function a bit differently. Though there are a few different kinds of ion beams, the purely energy-based ion “blasters” don’t actually project ions. They create ions out of thin air. First a pair of UV lasers shoot out to the target. These beams ionize two streams of air between the weapon and the target which serve as closed circuit conductor between the two. A split second there after a massive electrical discharge is shot down the ionized air circuits frying the target with more power than a lightning bolt, ionizing the victim. When the killer zap hits a person not only does it begin to vaporize him like an MD rated laser would, but also the electricity flows through the target’s entire body cooking the poor victim all at once. This inflicts a vaporized wound at the beam’s point of impact, but also additional vaporization and thermal damage throughout the body as whole. Given a powerful enough hit, it is possible for a single ion blast to “mist” an entire person in a single shot. This is a trick even a mega damage laser can’t do, but there are very few ion weapons that pack this much punch.

With directed and kinetic energy weapons covered, all that remained to make Dr. Hauck’s revolutionary Mega Damage scale complete was a way of applying the rule of measure to powerful explosives. While it would be easy enough to administer the measure to the overall strength of the blast, the resulting rating wouldn’t hold true to the spirit of the scale. The problem was that unlike everything else explosions exert their force in all directions. So unless the device is buried in the core of something, there is no way for all that energy to be directed against just a single target. Two targets on either side of the blast will take just as much damage as just the one in absence of the other, but neither one will take the full brunt of the explosive force. As such applying a Mega Damage rating to the overall power would result in a grossly overstated figure not truly indicative of what each kind of blast would do to a single target. Even though they actually pack in much more energy and force than any comparably sized directed energy weapon, it was decided to give them ratings in similar fashion as the focused attacks. All the Mega Damage ratings of the various explosive devices are their measure to penetrate a series of MDC rated target plates at point blank range. And, much like the difference between some of the other MD rated weapons, some explosive devices can vaporize living tissue better than others. Consequently it is important to know how each one works to see why each ones vaporizes their victims to the extent they do.

The functionality of each explosive device varies from one to the other even if they have similar Mega Damage ratings. This is because each kind of device affects the target in different ways, exposing it to different kinds of destructive power. For instance an armor piercing weapon uses a shaped charge to maximize the force of the blast more so on one spot than anywhere else, thus requiring much less bang to produce a significant punch. Most also employ a piece of metal called a penetrator that is vaporized by the explosion to form a searing hot jet that burns through a small spot on the target’s surface like a blowtorch on steroids. Alternately the ever classic HE (high explosive) devices use nothing but the brute force of rapid expansion and combustion to force its way through an opponent’s armor. Naturally this requires a much larger amount of conventional explosive material than the armor piercing weapons, and it still manages to get less penetration. But unlike armor piercing, HE exerts more energy in all directions making it more suitable to striking more than one target at a time. And then there are Fragmentation bombs that are kind of a cross between the HE devices and the armor piercing ones. Like the AP devices, they too use a metal penetrator, except theirs is in the form of a jacket around the entire apparatus that breaks apart sending shrapnel in all directions. As such frags require more conventional explosive material than the AP devices, but less than the HE warheads. The damage that results from this is less so caused by the rapid expansion of gases or searing heat, but instead by a hail of hard hitting jagged fragments. The last of these related devices, (all using conventional explosive materials to produce their desired effects), is the somewhat rare but very popular nuclear warheads. With the advent of a mix of synthetic isotopes of artificial molecules it has become possible to make a fission-based chain reaction out of smaller amounts of core fissionable material, resulting in a “clean nuke” explosion over a practical area. In the case of the miniature nuclear devices, only a small amount of explosive material is required to crush the special fissionable material at the center of these bombs to the point of critical mass. But the resulting explosion packs in far more punch than virtually anything else in the anti-armor/anti-personnel inventory.
And then there are the energy-based explosive devices; namely the closely related Plasma devices and the Micro-Fusion mechanisms. Along similar lines to the nuclear warheads, and yet completely different, there’s the Plasma warhead. These devices don’t use any conventional explosive materials at all, MD or otherwise. At the core of each one is a tiny capsule containing a small amount of highly compressed deuterium gas, (a.k.a. heavy hydrogen). When the device is activated an array of mega damage rated chemical lasers bombard the deuterium, rapidly exciting it into a plasma state. Though this causes the heavy hydrogen plasma to expand and burst free of its storage container, it is held in place by a magnetic field that activates and comes into being at this stage while the lasers continue to heat the gas to over a million degrees. Once heated to the desired temperature, the magnetic bottle instantly constricts upon itself forcing the deuterium plasma atoms to fuse into helium particles. For every 164 heavy hydrogen atoms in the bottle, 81.5 helium atoms are squeezed into being. That one missing equivalent of a heavy hydrogen atom is discharged as radiant energy, mostly in the form of jettisoned neutrons. When each cast off neutron strikes something and joins with its atomic structure, (not too dissimilar to water vapor condensing on a cold can of soda), kinetic heat is produced. And given that there are untold billions of neutrons striking everything they can in a given radius from the point of fusion, the shower of subatomic particles generates a LOT of heat… well into the Mega Damage range of effect. (Note: though technically kinetic in nature, because this interaction is on the molecular level, spells like “Impervious to Energy” are still effective against plasma.) If that weren’t bad enough the helium plasma, heated into a brilliant pink incandescent glow, bursts free of the magnetic bottle in a blazing pink flash and explosively rushes out into its surroundings. Between the kinetic neutron shower and the superheated helium plasma washing over ever thing in a given area, it’s little reason why plasma warheads are second in destructive power only to nuclear devices. Though the plasma explosives are actually thermonuclear fusion bombs, and thus potentially far more powerful than their nuclear fission counterparts, they are limited by power of the chemical lasers they depend on to convert their deuterium gas stores into plasma. The more gas in the central vessel, the larger and more powerful the chemical lasers have to be to cook off the deuterium atoms’ electrons in a very short period of time. And since no one wants a missile that takes a few minutes to go off, the volume of deuterium has to be small, thus limiting the explosive yield.

Along similar lines are the new and rare Micro-Fusion devices, (in the Rifts setting), which are actually just an offshoot of advanced particle beam technology. They too use deuterium to produce a fusion-based explosion just like that of the Plasma devices, (including the pink flash), except they do not require the gas to be laser phased into an excited plasma state. Instead of using a barrage of chemical lasers and a constricting magnetic bottle, all micro-fusion devices consist of a simple but expensive miniaturized EM ionized particle collision array. Two brief streams of deuterium ions are magnetically directed at each other a 99.96% the speed of light. When the series of ions strike each other they fuse and emit a great deal of energy in explosive fashion. The advantage of this setup is that it allows the fusion of more heavy hydrogen atoms together into helium than an equally sized plasma device ever could, resulting in a bigger bang. The disadvantage is that only a small given number of ions can be fused together before the release of energy completely destroys the machine. This limits the practical size of a Micro-Fusion device to that of a small ballistic grenade. Then can be made larger, but at this time it would not produce a larger explosion, just a more expensive machine. However it is theorized that for every hundredth of a percent they can speed up the emitted deuterium ions, twice the number of atoms can be fused before the blast blows everything apart, and thus doubling the destructive power.

As to how explosives fit into the original definition of the Mega Damage rating system, in addition to being able to breach MDC rated armors on a point to point basis, all of them generate sufficient enough heat or energy to cause the vaporization effect. But some do it better than others. Only the fragmentation and the armor piercing devices are incapable of completely vaporizing the flesh & bone off a Human being. In the case of the frag this is due to the fact that it is mostly dependent on flying shards of metal to transfer its energy and inflict its damage. That means that while it can inflict more damage than a single round fired from a rail gun, the total sum of fragments that strike a person vaporize about the same amount of tissue as that one round. Only instead of being focused all in one spot, the grievous injury is spread over the victim’s body in a uniform pattern with wounds roughly a few inches apart. The Armor piercing device’s blast on the other hand causes a more centralized kind of vaporization wound, but because of the way it focuses its power on a single spot the damage isn’t very widespread and is pretty much confined to the point of impact. After that, HE devices would come in third place for this function. Because high explosives are basically just rapidly expanding mediums, they tend to more so blow things apart than actually vaporize them, but the results are still pretty messy. Even so, since the intense heat caused by the blast is initially so intense, those who are virtually right on top of the explosion will be vaporized to the fullest extent of the MD scale of measure. However the rapid expansion quickly cools the blast’s heat making the rest of the damage just a short distance out more kinetic than thermal. Of the two remaining types of explosive devices, plasma, (as well as micro-fusion by relation), has to be the most effective in terms of vaporizing people over nuclear explosives. This is because though the small nuclear bombs cause tremendous amounts of heat, the plasma blasts heat the targets on both the atomic and macro levels, causing a complete and total eradication of any physical form a Human may have had. Though frankly, both do a fine job of reducing people to mist.

With that final but crucial part of the puzzle filled in, Dr. Hauck’s Mega Damage system was finally complete and applicable to every weapon in the US Military’s arsenal. And though the Europeans still rejected the obsolete Mega calorie system for their own SI purist reasons, they found the Mega Damage scale of measure to be more than acceptable and useful over their Joule rating system. In the span of just a few years all of the governments and militaries the globe over adopted the system, as did those in the private and commercial sectors. This was the first time in history any system of measure was truly universally accepted by all mankind… and as it just so happened to be, it was also the last.

[Subjugator]

therefore it is my heartfelt recommendation as a GM that,
if possible, this article be included in the revised sourcebook one.

Unlikely.

...but it should AT LEAST go into a Rifter article!

/Sub

[Nxla666]

You haven't submitted this yet...





Didn't we tell you awhile ago to send it in.

[Blight]

I am so using this in game much kudos!

[Prince Cherico]

this is awsome

[Dead Boy]

You haven't submitted this yet...

According to my records, it went out to the Rifter's submissions on or about March 22, 2006. That's why I'm posting the finished product now. My spidie-sense is telling me it isn't going to make the cut. Shame, but them's the breaks.

[Nxla666]

You haven't submitted this yet...

According to my records, it went out to the Rifter's submissions on or about March 22, 2006. That's why I'm posting the finished product now. My spidie-sense is telling me it isn't going to make the cut. Shame, but them's the breaks.

Damn and it was good to.

[Dead Boy]

You haven't submitted this yet...

According to my records, it went out to the Rifter's submissions on or about March 22, 2006. That's why I'm posting the finished product now. My spidie-sense is telling me it isn't going to make the cut. Shame, but them's the breaks.

Damn and it was good to.

Don't act so surprised. I'm not a bad writer when I get on a roll.