Can anybody help?
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Moderators: Immortals, Supreme Beings, Old Ones
Edmund Burke wrote:The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
eliakon wrote:Triax 1 is where they first show up
Game Masters Guide reprints them I'm pretty sure
Heroes of Humanity has them as well I believe
Vincent Takeda wrote:I know what your thinking... Did he fire six shots or only 5? In all the excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a 41 pound 120mm smooth bore depleted uranium longrod flying 3700mph capable of annihilating anything on the battlefield at a range of over a mile and a half, you've got to ask yourself one question.
glitterboy2098 wrote:The only issue i have with the WB5 stats for DU rounds is that they misrepresent the radiation hazard. They present U-rounds as radioactive and DU as not. Probably as a result of a misunderstanding of the 'depleted' term. It is a common mistake I've seen though.
DU is just as radioactive as standard uranium, the difference is just one of isotope ratios. DU having mostly an isotope that is useless for applications in nuclear weapons and powerplants, enriched uranium having mostly the useful isotope, and regular uranium having varying mixes of both.
This is why DU is so tricky to use in real life. Its density makes it very useful in armor and kinetic projectiles, but it also spreads little bits of itself around when it hits stuff (or stuff hits it, in the case of its use in tank armor) creating a radiation hazard.not usually a very intense one but one that can be tricky to clean up and have long term health hazards due to the material getting into biological cycles in the ecosystem. The same as with regular and enriched uranium. Really the only hazard you avoid is the possibility of a stored mass of rounds/material getting big enough to go critical or supercritical and release lethal levels of radiation.
The NGR would certainly be very careful in the use of both DU and U rounds. After all, they aren't going to want to risk contaminating the very ground they are trying to hold onto.
Hotrod wrote:The hilarious thing to me is that neither natural uranium nor depleted uranium are particularly radioactive or toxic, but the books present them as such environmental threats that the Coalition bans them. This is absurd on many levels. Even if you used weapons-grade uranium in these bullets, there would be essentially no radiation hazard (unless you had too much ammo packed in the drum and caused a criticality accident). The actual evidence for DU munitions causing significant environmental harm is pretty weak. The tungsten alloys that many military munitions now use in lieu of DU for their high-density bullets is actually more toxic and cancer-inducing than DU.
DU was the scapegoat for Gulf War Syndrome, but that's more of a guilt-by-association argument that ignores the many other things that come into play during war (other nasty chemicals coming from weapons, fuel/exhaust fumes, stress, et cetera). RationalWiki has a good run-down on the on-again, off-again DU scare and its .
Of course, it's also reasonable that the Coalition's self-inflicted ignorance (Books are bad? Really?) is to blame for this silly policy, but that doesn't explain why the narration seems to support it.
Shark_Force wrote:last i heard, drinking water contaminated by depleted uranium wasn't terribly good for your health. getting it on your skin is (relatively) fine. presumably it would be bad in extreme quantities (and of course having it fired at you with an extremely high velocity is going to be *very* bad for your health). getting it inside you and exposing your internal organs to it at close range, on the other hand, is not so good.
so while i wouldn't say that depleted uranium is guaranteed going to cause environmental problems, i'd expect the potential is there.
Razzinold wrote:U-Roumds.
Sohisohi wrote:Razzinold wrote:U-Roumds.
Where can regular Us be found, since we are on the topic.
Hotrod wrote:Shark_Force wrote:last i heard, drinking water contaminated by depleted uranium wasn't terribly good for your health. getting it on your skin is (relatively) fine. presumably it would be bad in extreme quantities (and of course having it fired at you with an extremely high velocity is going to be *very* bad for your health). getting it inside you and exposing your internal organs to it at close range, on the other hand, is not so good.
so while i wouldn't say that depleted uranium is guaranteed going to cause environmental problems, i'd expect the potential is there.
It's a question of concentration. As toxins go, uranium is so low that we don't have a reliable LD 50/30 (that's acute toxicity, meaning the level at which you have a 50% chance of dying within 30 days). There is some weak data that exposure to elevated concentrations of uranium in the air and water may cause some effects, but most of those are based on epidemiology studies, where the logic goes something like "people in the Gulf War were around a lot of DU. They had some health problems. Therefore DU may have caused those health problems." There have been some animal studies of DU contamination, but those studies aren't human studies and generally involve very high doses of DU.
By comparison, lead is acutely toxic (will kill you directly) and is proven to cause health problems even at levels that aren't acutely toxic. People shoot lead bullets all the time. Uranium sounds scary to the layman because it's used as a fuel in nuclear reactors and weapons, but unless you're splitting a lot of uranium atoms, its health effects are pretty mild compared to the other junk you find in military munitions.
Vincent Takeda wrote:I mean I'm pretty sure most of the damage from a DU round comes from the fact that its coming at you at mach 4 and it weighs as much as a car battery. At least in terms of the 120mm abrams round.
glitterboy2098 wrote:That dust though is the major danger. While only an alpha emmitter and thus mostly harmless, if ingested or absorbed by the body via the lungs in too high aquantity, it can cause heavy metal toxicity as well as mes up cells with its radiation. In small quantities the body can deal with it via the usual filtering and excreting methods, but if the concentrations are high enough it'll still do a fair bit of damage before removal, and the usual means of removal from the body can be overwhelmed if concentrations are high enough. Such as the levels you'd get after a major battle where one side is firing thousands and thousands of DU railgun rounds.