HESH/spallation effect kills/distance by surface type?

[Tsathoggua]

Anyone know the damage reduction per surface type for kills occurring via the spallation effect ?

 

(this is where a surface hit by a high-yield explosive or more usually in reality, rounds designed to enhance the effect, hits the target and effectively, transferring energy through the detonation shockwave, transfers enough energy to cause a soft kill of a hardened target, by spalling off lots of high velocity fragments on the inner side of E.g a tank, wwhich go on to strike the crew (or members of a troop transports squad nearest e.g a sonic pulser/DPL: or other high yield blast, for different weapons and surface types is?and/or armor?

 

would be useful to know when planning to hit an enemy on the far side of a wall or craft. And how far is the maximum effect radius for the likes of DPL/sonic pulser/magna blast pack/tank rounds, fusion ball rounds from hovertanks etc. and work out if the result is a likely kill, or blowing the walls in to expose the squad to a living, very pissed target. Just had a very angry bio drone to deal with from several tiles off. Thankfully it didn't explode when hit by masses of react fire from the entire squad from a mix of sonic cannon, a few pistol shots from a gas cannon user low on TU and a GC-IC shell plus a solid bolt round from thee nearby tank. Enough rounds hit to put it down for good..not to mention pretty much level some poor bastards home on an island mission. And that being after the sonic grenades set as demo charges

had blown half the house in. Bet that led to one hell of an insurance claim:P

[sp1ke]

Check the Explosions article on UFOPaedia.org. Basically explosion damage reduces based on distance from the epicentre, with further reductions for any intervening tiles. Cross reference the damage capacity of the tiles which is also given somewhere on UFOPaedia.org. But basically there is no spallation effect as such: antipersonnel damage never increases due to a shockwave or jet passing through a hard target. All the explosions are modelled as very vanilla HE or frag type of explosions. There is no concept of a shaped charge or penetrator explosion or anti-armour explosion, even for rockets. They are all spherical explosions. Or rather, circular - 3D is not modelled, though it is possible to do damage to a ceiling or a floor tile. I'm not sure if explosion damage ever transmits even to the adjacent cube above or below the impact point, or if attacking an enemy above or below cover is a two step process that first requires you to destroy the cover. People use this tactic a lot but I don't have experience of it.

 

I find it mildly irritating that Earth-tech armour piercing explosives are not used on XCOM personal and tank weapons, given the tough problem of alien armour. Many aliens would profit from being engaged with a LAAW, Armbrust, or some other infantry carried shaped charge weapon rather than vanilla HE. Shaped charges would also be tactically easier to use due to the slightly reduced risk of friendly fire and collateral damage.

[Tsathoggua]

• Explosion damage has seemingly gone through a considerable distance, just seen it a couple of times where a sonic pulser blew out the rear of a triton transport,and took about a third, tile or so less id say, killing 2-3 rows of very lightly armored troopers. damn near took out half the squad and badly damaged the back of the triton. no idea where the grenade came from, there were two lobstermen one just to the back one a bit upwards and slightly to the upper left of the map. saw it come in close but not the source.
  

But when I was messing around with HEs, the likes of a wax-bound TNT charge and a small TNT or PETN/HMTD booster, withmercury fulminate initiator, a charge would cut straight through a metal plate and carry on going to obliterate wooden boards etc or thinner metal placed behind. On something squishy like an aquanaut, theres no bloody chance in hell that theaquanaut's body would slow down a shockwave from a significant sized charge [by this I mean, more than maybe a few grams, test scale maybe, but the recipient is still going to end up badly mauled at best/worst depending who is using the HE weapon]I've only been reading very recently about sonoacoustic lasers, aka SASERs, not nearly had enough time to work out how to build the accoustic 'optics' and appropriate containment/pumping setup for a suitable gain medium to try and build one. But that would work perfectly for the alien's sonic weaponry. The sperm whale apparently has a lower-powered version, the spermaceti in the head chamber is arranged in front of a parabolic reflector made of whalebone, the spermaceti acts as an accoustic reverberation and gain medium to produce a focused sonic shockwave powerful enough for use to stun fish.Would be fun as hell to try and build a working sonic rifle or cannon, just for the hell of it. Coincidentally the shape of the sonic cannon in TFTD is what inspired me, there are a few features that just might well be roughly ideal for the overall layout of such a weapon. Interestingly, ordinary water might make a suitable gain medium, via inducing oscillations in a cavitating bubble chamber. This seemingly is a functional gain medium for this SASER phenomenon. Its basically the analog of a laser, but where the induced avalanche of energy is in the form of phonons rather than photons, the output being a highly coherent sonic beam or pulse.

[sp1ke]

Yes the problem is that aquanauts do not in any way reduce the effect of HE when it passes through their squelchy shredded bodies.

For that matter, I don't believe even heavily armoured units have any effect on the HE shock wave.

[Tsathoggua]

That wasn't really my point sp1ke. I was more making comment on the fact that the sonic pulser took part of the triton out and proceeded to liquify several rows of aquanauts. two at least, I think, three, although my memory is a little...foggy on that one, chasing the dragon while supposed to be on duty...perhaps something that the base commanders don't need to find out:P

 

Still, nothing that could have been done anyway despite that little indiscretion, barely had time to get a man out of the door when 4-5 lobbies coming from all sides, plus a sniper up in a house, definitely a lobsterman up there and from the sound of it a biodrone as well. another biodrone and lobsterman coming at us from the south-southwest and grenades, biodrone and heavy sonic fire, sonic pistol fire heard but not seen...mission was a fucking writeoff, rapidly got pelted with sonic and biodrone fire from all sides, grenades falling like rain. It was a damn wonder there was so much as an aquanaut's leftover dogend on the seabed let alone anything of the triton. So the shockwave obviously does at least in some instances pass through the walls.

 

I wasn't suggesting exactly that there were a special HESH type HE round, but making a comparison to realworld tactical antiarmor weaponry. For the sake of realism, that would be the most accurate way to model the infliction of damage to soft targets standing adjacent or within a short distance of the solid barrier. Its not the explosive shockwave with HESH thats lethal, well not the primary effect with HESH (high explosive squash head, they rely on basically slapping a blob of plastic explosive onto the target that flattens out like a pancake that then is set off either by the detonator or the other half of a tandem charge warhead, producing a load of flaked-off armor fragments on the inside. Its these not the shockwave that cause the casualties. The intent being to kill the crew. Not sure if the idea is also to save the tank, if tank the target be, for capture by the attacking forces, or how much structural damage your average anti-tank HESH round does, but I would think it less than a standard HEAT round of equivalent yield, due to the shaped charge effect. Depending of course on where the round strikes and the type and thickness of armor being assaulted)

 

Would be neat to see it modeled if possible in future x-comutil releases if there are any.

 

Something like a HESH round for the coelacanth, specifically for taking down targets hiding in likely places in USOs, bases, known positions, hiding in rooms that give the enemy a near perfect defensive hole up. (or maybe something like a flamethrower...damn that'd be neat..but i should keeep on track here...) Thats probably

owed to having just been shot at by an aquatoid hiding in a two-three tile airlock type double door setting (random USO layout, just fixed thouse shit dye grenade woes and I'l really liking the challenge of the layout modification. Just caught one shooting at my trooper, so had another soldier that had just happened to be squatting down beside some rocks and coral, taking careful aim and popping an incendiary torpedo round right into its foxhole. Did NOT like that one bit haha, no running out, just a high pitched pained shriek and one splattered mass of green squidgy pulped aquatoid. left as a fine dispersion, spattered liberaly around that corridor.

 

Serves the bastard right for trying to blow my squaddie's head off.

 

Captured a medic, too:D although of course its being saved for last, given how dangerous the medics are with regards to tech trees. Saving the medic for nailing the xarquid and triscene, Assuming xcomutil doesn't fix the rarity issue.

 

And a human or bug body shouldn't reduce the effect of a HE round going off, or grenades/demolition charges etc, fuck no, not a chance from all but the tiniest HE charge. Played about quite a bit with explosives and incendiaries as a child and teenager (yes, I know, I admit, I had a rather....unorthodox..childhood; and that is putting it mildly. Spent my free time not playing with other kids for a fair part, but concentrating on things like isolation of alkali metals from their salts, distilling off the bulk of acidified iodine tincture with a little H2O2, to liberate the remaining iodine bound up as KI, or blowtorching the end of glass tubing blown out to a disposable vessel, filled with argon or nitrogen, or evacuated and sealed, then heating one end cooling the other in ice, to turn red phosphorus into white; scarlet [schenck's phosphorus), violet, Hittorf's other violet phosphorus allotrope, which shares in common with black P, a metalloid or metallic, conductive character and black P are next on my list. Black is going to be hard work though as it requires subjecting white phosphorus to intense pressure and high temperature. Spent most of my nights working at the lab bench rather than sleeping for school haha.

 

Been after bagging the full set of allotropic forms of the elements that show allotropy, mainly P, Bi, As, Fe, selenium, maybe tellurium, nitrogen although the other form is very unstable, created via passage of N2 through a glow discharge, and ozone (O3), which itself apparently occurs both as linear and cyclic O3, and 'red ozone' which is either O4, known as oxazone or osazone, and O8, the red allotrope. I seem to recall it having one other, possibly metastable allotropic form, possibly uranium, not sure if it does, but given the similarity to plutonium, which shows some funky behavior at really high pressure/temperature, but in the case of Pu, I can't achieve all those, as many apparently are forms only

produced in the immediate implosion/fission phase of a nuclear explosion as the pit is compressed by the HE charge around it and begins to fission. Not about to set

off a nuke in my lab:P

 

Including the practical allotropic forms makes for a way to expand my element collection, and of course plenty of the variants show interesting properties, phosphorus especially, and carbon, as both have so many allotropes and polymeric forms that they will keep me occupied for a pretty long time, especially if nanostructures like carbon nanotubes, graphene, silicene, germanene (silicon and germanium analogs of graphene, a monatomic layer of carbon that shows some really funky properties...germanium especially intrigues me, for its semiconductive properties in the normal form. Or at least has potential for use in semiconductor tech.

[sp1ke]

Basically the game's understanding of military explosive warheads pre-dates WW II. :-)

Although for TFTD this is more forgiveable as the physics of underwater explosions are much less well understood, often counter intuitive, and a lot of the interesting research is still classified.

[Tsathoggua]

Oh don't tempt me.

 

It would make for a neat mod if it could be done, to update its..ahem...physics package;)

IC grenades wouldnt go amiss either. Total oversight there in TFTD.

I find that perhaps the GC/IC rounds perhaps one of the handiest strategic tools. Plenty ways to make a bang sure but those rounds do low splash damage but are more useful for it, can be used closer in for clearing rooms and flushing hostiles out of cover either into kill zones, forcing high threat targets to back off, or forcing a or timed grenade/demolition charge.unit to take a cicuitous route either to drain their TUs and allow the stunner or drillers to cut loose, else forcing bugs to back into a prox mine

[Tsathoggua]

Anyhow, I didn't mean to suggest per se, that the HESH effect was in the mechanics of TFTD, but using powerful enough explosive rounds its possible, even against the thick walls of an alien base, to score a kill if you know where to put the DPL round (probably the only explosive, other than the blasting charges that would stand a chance, and I'm not too sure about the charges. Besides, good luck placing it and having time to run away again AND not risk the intended recipient of the blast not buggering off elsewhere while they are SUPPOSED to be standing there, waiting to be blown into sushi.

 

But penetration depth does seem to be different against different surface types with land-based explosives, at least, or internal vs external walls (and possibly doors, not quite sure on that one) or the thinner walls of those sniper tower things in base upper, seafloor sections), what I wanted to know was if anyone had thoroughly examined HOW far and much more interestingly, how much the damage of varying explosion types travels through different surface types. Would be useful to know to help calculate kill probability especially for say, popping an alien standing on a floor above the head of an aquanaut, using HEs, aiming diaganally/straight up (god...what a shock that must come as, having some rude combat diver launching a DPL right up the...starfish, as it were:D

[sp1ke]

your question was already answered on 11 June... scroll up... check the Explosions article, everything you want to know (that is known) is there.

[Tsathoggua]

Oh,oops. Thanks sp1ke.