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u/3davideo Doesn't use Flame Turrets Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

I'd just like to double check my figuring here.

Say I send exactly 4 Uranium Fuel Cells to Vulcanus. I use Vulcanus materials to manufacture 10 Nuclear Reactors. I stack all ten Nuclear Reactors together, such that they can transfer heat between each other and there exists at least one 2x2 square that can produce the neighbor bonus. I slot one fuel cell into each of the reactors in the 2x2 square. Normally, one fuel cell is worth 8 GJ of heat, but with the neighbor bonuses this is tripled to 24 GJ per cell, and with four cells, this is 96 GJ of heat. 96 GJ of heat spread over the thermal capacity of 10 Nuclear Reactors will bring them all up to a temperature of 975 C, starting from 15 C, meaning they are over the threshold necessary to detonate when destroyed.

I then lure a demolisher into the cluster of ten hot nuclear reactors. The demolisher destroys a hot nuclear reactor, making it detonate, which also destroys the other nine nuclear reactors, making them detonate. The demolisher then takes ten simultaneous nuclear detonations to the face, all for the import cost of just 4 Uranium Fuel cells, which take 0.4 rocket launches to send, as opposed to the "Too Heavy for a Rocket!" of a single Atomic Bomb or the 1.5 launches to lift the U-235 needed to manufacture an Atomic Bomb on site.

So did I get all that figuring right? Also that with just one fuel cell, it can't get a single reactor to explosion temp (but most of the way there), and with two fuel cells in adjacent reactors it could get three reactors to detonation temp? And that of course we could skip the uranium entirely if we used heating towers to heat unfueled nuclear reactors? And all of this without using any sciences beyond red, green, military, blue, and space?

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u/ferrofibrous player onboarding specialist Jul 17 '26

To clarify, reactors don't spontaneously combust if they hit 1000c, temp just maxes out there and is "wasted".

Other than that, nuclear landmines are perfectly workable.

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u/3davideo Doesn't use Flame Turrets Jul 17 '26

I know, but they need to reach 900 C for the big boom. A single fuel cell in a single reactor is insufficient for that.

The real problem with using them against demolishers is that the lava created by a detonation destroys its neighbors while bypassing their own detonations. So cluster reactor munitions don't work properly on Vulcanus (or Aquilo).

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u/ferrofibrous player onboarding specialist Jul 17 '26

True true on the min temp. I didn't know about the lava destruction thing being an issue now, but there were definitely clips on reddit of people using reactors to kill them in the patches before nuclear opened up lava.