Which is easier to produce, ballistic ammo or energy ammo? (lorewise)

[vroix]

I wonder, based on fallout lore/ canon, which one is easier to produce? the conventional ballistic ammo or energy ammo like fusion cell and plasma cartridge.

At first I thought that fusion cell is just like normal battery, so in order to recharge it we just have to put some electricity in it. But it seems like it has nuclear inside it.

I don't reallly know nuclear physic but I think nuclear material isn't something people can easily create in the wasteland.

conventional ammo on other hand uses gunpowder which is easier to create, I guess.

 

So what do you think?

[midfit]

Well seeing as reloading ballistic ammo is done in the millions or rounds every day in RL by hobbyists. I don't see it being far fetched seeing as the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Lasers and explosives, existed tells me that laser weapons were common and sold to the public right along with ballistic firearms. So that being said it would be more likely than not that they would have had reloading equipment for energy weapons. Also the mind set of Fallout universe is set in the 40-50's and firearms regulations were almost unheard of. Just like today you can buy machine guns with the right paper work it would have been the same. Think how many times you open a safe in an office building or grocery store and find an energy weapon. So to answer your question yes it think it was possible and was something that was most likely a big business. Now as far as Fusion cores and Mini Nukes, I have a hard time with those being made or recharged in a guys basement while he was watching the game and drinking beer. Just my 2C

[Raycheetah]

Another consideration is that the world was at war, and people, even civilians, were gearing up for the worst. After all, the Commie Menace was always just around the corner. And with so many soldiers under arms (as well as so many in the workforce in the arms industry), it isn't so difficult to imagine Johnny Yank "requisitioning" some military-grade firepower for the folks at home.

 

Just in case. =^[.]^=

[Moraelin]

Well, I have SOME idea of physics, so maybe I can help.

 

Realistically speaking, those bateries are basically cold fusion, so it's as SF as it gets. So, you know, before I start, bear in mind that we're on par with debating Star Trek warp coils at this point.

 

That said... nuclear material is probably not uranium or plutonium or such. Essentially you can at least theoretically create energy by either

 

A) fission, i.e., splitting a big atom into smaller ones. You want something very heavy for that.

 

B) fusion, i.e., joining smaller atoms into a big one. You want to start from as light elements as you can. Heavier than iron you can't even theoretically get energy from fusion. Also, the heavier stuff you want to start from, the more insane energy you need to get it started. It can get into millions of degrees really fast to even get anything heavier than hydrogen fusing.

 

The easiest to fuse would be deuterium and tritium, but the problem there is that tritium is very radioactive, and decays really fast. If those prewar batteries had any tritium in them to start with, they'd have stopped working like 150 years ago.

 

Probably the easiest and most stable combination at the moment is based on deuterium and lithium. That's what was used in thermonuclear bombs, for example. Both elements are very stable, and you can even just combine them with each other as lithium deuteride, and just have them together. Or I guess if they managed to go deuterium-deuterium, that would produce even more energy per weight.

 

Both are also reasonably cheap to mass produce in an industrial setting, and obviously even more so in Fallout, since just about everything runs on fusion. Even cars and trains and whatnot run on fusion, so it can't cost millions.

 

Or let me rephrase that. The thing about fusing those, is that tiny quantities produce vast amounts of energy. It has an energy density a couple million times higher than gasoline, or for that matter than gunpowder. You're probably using fractions of a milligram per shot with a laser weapon, at which point the cost of the deuterium is probably cheaper than the cordite in a rifle round costs.

 

I would expect most of the cost would be in the rest of the battery. Whatever can get those to fuse in such a controlled and safe way. I'd also expect that it wouldn't be as easy to make one of those after the war as rolling your own brass.

 

Now assuming that that rest of the battery doesn't get damaged too much while being used, the good news is that it would probably be not much harder to reload with lithium deuteride than it is to reload brass for conventional guns. Pretty much you just need to open the battery, put the stuff in, and seal it back. The technical details of that would depend on the exact construction, but that would be basically the gist of it. As long as you can lay your mitts on some pre-war fuel, or have a spare fusion core to take apart, and know what you're doing, you could probably reload fusion cells for quite a while.

Edited April 8, 2016 by Moraelin

[vroix]

Interesting.

Producing fusion cell might be more complicated than producing bullets and not all people have the know how to produce it, but it still possible to mass produce them.

Maybe that's why the minutemen has laser musket as their signature weapon. They must have (or had) people that know how to produce fusion ammo.

 

Then I guess laser weapons can be considered a common weapon in fallout universe (a bit more expensive than conventional firearms, but can still be used for everyday use).

[SharraShimada]

Okay, what do we need?

Normal bullets: a shell, that contains a projectile of some sort, something that goes boom to move the damn thing and a percussion cap. Nothing more, no witchcrafting involved. Today, everyone with a bit of knowledge and simple tools can make them (if you are allowed to do so...). And besides shotgun-shells, every conventional ammo works by the same design. The differences are in size and power, but thats it.

 

Energy-Cells should also be simple to make, because they are really only high-power batteries or capacitors, so no problem here. Yeah you need the materials and a more advanced workbench, but if you know your way around electrics, thats also doable.

 

The fusion thing in fallout is way of the chart in both getting the materials, and making them.

For fusion you need pressure and temperature. If one goes down, the other has to go up. Due to limitations of the materials, you cant push the pressure over a certain limit. So you have to heat the damn thing.

Then you have to contain the fusion-material in a magnetic-shielding, preventing it to touch the outer wall of your reactor.

 

In theory, you could build such a thing, but in real? You wont get the high-grade magnets, you wont geht the high-grade materials, and you need a high-tech-laboratory to even build the magnet-shielding.

The only possible way, i could imagine is, that, in some point of history, a company (like general atomics) has build them, and now (200 years later) all we do, is to replace the fusion-material and some elements of the ignition-system.

But building a fusion-core or fusion-cell from scratch, outside the institute at least... no way.

[Moraelin]

Yep, my money is on reloading old cells too.

[vroix]

Yeah, energy cell is much simpler to make I think. Back in New Vegas and Fallout 3 laser pistol uses energy cell. But in Fallout 4 all laser weapon use this Fission (or was it Fusion?) Cells just like the microfusion cells. Is this actually the same with energy cell but bigger? or it's more like the fusion core for power armour?

 

The theory on replacing the fusion material and ignition system make sense I guess. That will explain why some factions has abundance of laser weapons.

[Moraelin]

I kinda suspect that the designs are different for different sized reactors.

 

E.g., for cars the fact that the "coolant" needs to be changed and becomes radioactive kinda suggests to me that it's actually the medium exposed directly to the reaction, and probably then run through a turbine. As in, direct heating. The becoming radioactive would be consisten with neutron activation, over very long time, since a deuterium-lithium breeder reactor involves both fast and slow neutrons. In this scenario you don't NECESSARILY have to get electricity out of it, since basically you can just connect the turbine to the gearbox instead, just like the engine of a normal car.

 

A fusion cell... really, I don't know how it would work. The fusion doesn't produce electricity as such, it produces heat. So you'd need some way to convert that energy into electricity. Seriously beats me how.

 

I mean, you could imagine a small turbine in the rather big cell, but that would produce a LOT of heating. Or maybe they found a way, possibly involving ionizing somet medium or another.

 

Another imaginable way would be basically to somehow use the energy from the fusion to directly excite the laser, in which case it's basically not as much a battery as a sealed hot-swappable piece of the laser gun.

 

A fusion core, on the other hand, I suppose you need to get SOME electricity out of it, but most of that when used as a battery could be done by the big generator it's stuck in. Since hydraulics are definitely mentioned in relation to power armour, I suppose one could also use the heat directly to drive the hydraulics, with only a small portion converted into electricity for the electronic parts.

 

What I'm getting at is that they don't NECESSARILY have to be the same design at different scales. They COULD be, but it can also be wildly different results for different purposes, that just share the same fuel.

[minngarm]

Based on mechanics the microfusion cell is not a fusion generator but a battery storing fusion generated energy, so basically it is a micro battery. Which means it can be recharged multiple times until the chemical component "goes bad" See real world car batteries for that.

 

It also means it is a simple chemical process and a proper material container to create it. So really easy for a chemist.

 

Of course gun powder (note not black powder.) is easy to produce for a chemist as well, so they sort of fall on the same line.

 

The difference is if you know about connecting negative and positive lines or if you know how to press metal in metal without generating a spark (fairly simple once shown.)

 

The casing is much the same as the cell, you need to check for imperfections, clean the contacts on one, and run a tumbler to clean the residue on the other.

 

The only real concern is the manufacture of primers. That is a complex process. So I guess energy cells would be easier to make.