Contest!

[C James]

I thought it would be fun to have a contest!

 

A few of you felt, for whatever reason, that the situation at the end of Chapter 45, Ragnar

[Bondwriter]

Darn, I should have gotten an entry before...

Now, if I say

a Zeppelin saves The Scar and Instinct, who can then party all night long

, some will consider it cheating...

[Conner]

Clues, riddles and such things, make my head hurt. :wacko:

 

Here is my entry anyway:

 

The Great Goat from the Heavens <bows to His Majestic Goatness> comes down and throws a freezeframe on the whole mess. The reason being He was planning to vacation on this very Island in a few weeks and will not tolerate a bunch of humans ruining his fun. So He backs up events surrounding the bomb and the volcano. He then places The Scar and Eric in a sealed room. The only weapon in the room is a bottle of tequila. Whoever exits the rooms, once the tequila settles,is declared the victor. Eric wins of course. And then there's a pool party.

 

I readily accept I won't win...but the real fun in life is in participation, is it not?

[Benji]

.................

Eric will wake up from a tequila hangover in a hotel room and realizes it was all a bad dream!

I think in addition to dropping into the ocean the volcano will instead push the broken shelf out far enough away out to sea that the noxious gas will 'miss' the resort and rush into the created gap. The 'new island' will stop sinking as it is still tethered to the island from long ago volcanic vent activity underneath the sea. Scar waited too long to leave, the airfield unusable from the new fractures on the runway.

[Phantom]

If I remember right from my science class, we talked about this particular instance.

 

The island itself won't crack in half and dump into the ocean. In previous chapters it was mentioned that the resort where everyone was overlooked a cliff(hanger) meaning that the resort was above sea level. So what could happen is that yes the resort does fall, but not as much as everyone thinks. Meanwhile the pyroclastic flow that is heading down from the volcano is moving at a high speed so the sudden drop of the resort area will mean that the flow will overshoot the resort or graze the top of it.

 

Remember the physics lessons. You have an object rolling down a hill. It gathers momentum which can (if the force is right) send it over a space or where a sudden drop is. Pyroclastic flows (to my memory) follow the same principal so it would mean that it overshoots the resorts. Yes ash ans such will still be an issue but the super heated stuff will graze the top of the resort or shoot over it.

 

That's my theory

 

Eric

[Conner]

So, Eric, has a copy of Chapter 46 shown up in your mail box???

 

I'm still wondering about the bomb. So the bomb caused the volcano to erupt. But what about the bomb itself? I understand that nuclear bombs can be hazradous to health? You know, blast forces and radioactivity. :wacko:

[Benji]

So, Eric, has a copy of Chapter 46 shown up in your mail box???

 

I'm still wondering about the bomb. So the bomb caused the volcano to erupt. But what about the bomb itself? I understand that nuclear bombs can be hazradous to health? You know, blast forces and radioactivity. :wacko:

 

............ Sounds like the initial second of the blast released gamma rays from both ends of the tunnel, afterwords the mountain collapsed on it and the radiation and the blast force went towards the volcano. The Iranian blast did not send up a signature mushroom cloud, it too had the mountain collapse on it.

Edited July 19, 2009 by Benji

[Phantom]

Well, here's a simple and easy physics lessons when dealing with nuclear weapons.

 

Alpha Rays - They cannot penetrate simple paper or clothing.

Beta Rays - They have a hard time penetrating metallic objects and such

Gamma Rays - They cannot penetrate anything that is lead lined or very thick concrete.

 

When a nuclear weapons explodes (CJ did an amazing job describing it) the force of the explosion comes in three waves. First, the light. Depending on the yeild and proximity you are to it, it can possibly blind you. Also, the flash is the release of Radiation in the forms of the three waves which can cause anything from a sunburn to a heavy dose leading to cancer and worse. The second wave is a pressure wave which causes the most immediate destruction. The sudden increase in pressure can destroy/damage buildings or even obliterate them depending on how close it is. Third wave is radioactive fallout. This is the most dangerous because it contains not only radioactive particeles that land on the skin, but can also be breathed in and digested, leading to cancer and other diseases.

 

Also, when an Atomic is deatonated on the ground, it looses a lot of it's momentum and destructive abilities, and when detonated underground, the earth can act as a bunker, keeping in most of the crud that comes from it. That's why when nukes are used, they're set off as an airburst, so that the energy caused by the weapon has more room to expand and destroy.

 

This all comes from memory so I could be wrong, but I thought it might help people get a quick background on what a nuke can do

 

Eric

[C James]

Well, here's a simple and easy physics lessons when dealing with nuclear weapons.

 

Alpha Rays - They cannot penetrate simple paper or clothing.

Beta Rays - They have a hard time penetrating metallic objects and such

Gamma Rays - They cannot penetrate anything that is lead lined or very thick concrete.

 

When a nuclear weapons explodes (CJ did an amazing job describing it) the force of the explosion comes in three waves. First, the light. Depending on the yeild and proximity you are to it, it can possibly blind you. Also, the flash is the release of Radiation in the forms of the three waves which can cause anything from a sunburn to a heavy dose leading to cancer and worse. The second wave is a pressure wave which causes the most immediate destruction. The sudden increase in pressure can destroy/damage buildings or even obliterate them depending on how close it is. Third wave is radioactive fallout. This is the most dangerous because it contains not only radioactive particeles that land on the skin, but can also be breathed in and digested, leading to cancer and other diseases.

 

Also, when an Atomic is deatonated on the ground, it looses a lot of it's momentum and destructive abilities, and when detonated underground, the earth can act as a bunker, keeping in most of the crud that comes from it. That's why when nukes are used, they're set off as an airburst, so that the energy caused by the weapon has more room to expand and destroy.

 

This all comes from memory so I could be wrong, but I thought it might help people get a quick background on what a nuke can do

 

Eric

Thank you Eric!!!

 

You're right.. A nuclear blast underground does leave most of the fallout underground, though a little will often leak out (enough for air samples to detect the blast in many cases). It also has a unique seismic signature.

 

As we saw with the blast in Iran earlier in the story, only the secondary reaction in the Uranium Hexeflouride partially masked the siesmic signature there, but it was still discernible as a nuclear event once they knew what to look for.

 

In an earlier chapter, there was an earthquake in Los Angeles. One of the reasons for it was to show that energy release can be measured in kilotons (or megatons, for a big one). That was among the first clues that Cumbre Vieja would be triggered by a nuke (and why I often mentioned Mount Saint Hellens, which had it's major collapse and eruption triggered by a quake).

 

Okay, now that 45 has posted, I can share an issue that I wrestled with since before chapter one, back when I was laying out the overall plot. It was where would Jerry detonate the nuke? At that point, I did not know that the only road tunnel in the world that transects an acive volcano was, oh so conveniently, located on the northern flanks of Cumbre Vieja. (the tunnel, BTW, is quite real). Before I found it, my initial idea was to use one of the famous water tunnels, which I remembered visiting when I was very young. Those are bored into the mountainsides as water sources. I wrongly thought that Cumbre Vieja had some, but then I found out they were only in the north of the island. Ooops. At that point, the only thing I could think of was a geothermal power station (often, the boreholes those use are large, about 18 inches, and a gun-assembly nuke can easily be made that small, though it would have been a stretch for the Iranians to have made one with a narrow diameter for a first-generation weapon). The idea of a geothermal station on the slopes of Cumbre Vieja isn't as far-fetched as it sounds; tere are such station in active volcanic fields in Iceland. One even inadvertently tapped a magma pocket, once. A station was at one time proposed for Cumbre Vieja, so I was thinking of having it in the story, until I blundered on the runnel. I'm glad I did, because the scene were Eric and Jansen on their first date, are driving through with the nukes is one of my favorites.