Mis­cal­cu­la­tions

I’ll dis­cuss only the path in which Winter fol­lows Cyr­us. I also have to point out some as­sump­tions I’ve made be­fore the ac­tual cal­cu­la­tions:

1. The Sule is sim­ilar to the Earth. Be it size, at­mo­sphere or chem­ical com­pos­i­tion of soil;
2. The bomb ex­ploded some­where over Gab­rea;
3. Both the cap­ital of Brighton and the city over which the nuke ex­ploded are as close as pos­sible;
4. Ac­cur­acy of the map is reas­on­able.

The map is 3000 pixels wide which makes one pixel rep­res­ent about 13.35km. The red­dish line is $\sqrt{228^2 + 213^2} \approx 312$ pixels long, there­fore dis­tance between the coun­tries in ques­tion turns out to be $312 \times 13.35 \approx 4168$ kilo­metres.

Shock wave

The cit­izens of Brighton could ob­serve the blind­ing ex­plo­sion just $\frac{4168}{229.8} \approx 14$ mil­li­seconds after the event. Between the ex­plo­sion visu­als and a sound ef­fect, which sup­posedly meant the ar­rival of shock wave, there was just a few lines of dia­logue I’d give at most a minute to act out. Too bad the shock wave needs whole $\frac{4168}{480} \approx 8.7$ minutes¹ to travel all the way from Gab­rea to Brighton, there­fore in the game shock wave comes at least 8.7 times faster than it should. A small mis­take, oops.

In fur­ther cal­cu­la­tions I’ll as­sume that whole 8.7 minutes have already passed after the ex­plo­sion when the shock wave sound ef­fect has played.

Sick­ness

Shock wave is fol­lowed by Cyr­us’ ex­plan­a­tion about how dire the situ­ation ac­tu­ally is after which they fi­nally tele­port out. Given length of the ex­plan­a­tion I rate it at (at most) 5 minutes. Tele­port­a­tion, as can be seen earlier in game, takes only 5 seconds to com­plete, which puts Winter at ex­actly $8.7\mathrm{min} + 5\mathrm{min} + 5\mathrm{sec} = 826$ seconds of ex­pos­ure to γ ra­di­ation.

826 seconds only and strictly only if there was any no­tice­able change in back­ground ra­di­ation in the first place! The strength of ra­di­ation is in­versely pro­por­tional to the dis­tance from the ex­plo­sion centre², thus even at re­l­at­ively short dis­tances from the ex­plo­sion centre the ra­di­ation de­creases to neg­li­gible levels. For com­par­ison one can­not even meas­ure the change of ra­di­ation back­ground 200 kilo­metres away from the ex­plo­sion of 20Mt nuke³⁴.

Look­ing at the ef­fects table to ex­per­i­ence the same symp­toms Winter had (vomit­ing and diarrhoea to be ex­act), her body had to ab­sorb from 2 to 6 grays of ion­ising ra­di­ation. Given 826 seconds of ex­pos­ure the dose rate had to be any­thing between $8.717\frac{\mathrm{Gy}}{\mathrm{h}}$ and $26.15\frac{\mathrm{Gy}}{\mathrm{h}}$. I’m not sure I need to point out I’m hav­ing a hard time think­ing up spe­cific­a­tions of a bomb which would in­duce such strong ra­di­ation 4168 kilo­metres away from it’s ex­plo­sion loc­a­tion and not break the Sule apart.

Amend­ments

Dis­cus­sion at Dis­chan for­ums⁵ poin­ted out that all my cal­cu­la­tions are com­pletely de­pend­ent on the first as­sump­tion. In­deed they are, so I’ll write how I came to con­clu­sion this as­sump­tion is safe enough to be de­pended on. If the Sule is big­ger than the Earth, the story of ir­ra­di­ation is even more un­likely as the dis­tance between Gab­rea and Brighton is even lar­ger. On the other hand the planet can’t get much smal­ler (or more ac­cur­ately, easier⁶) and still be cap­able of hav­ing an at­mo­sphere.

Com­bat­Player poin­ted out that the game could be set in a dif­fer­ent uni­verse fol­low­ing dif­fer­ent phys­ics al­to­geth­er. In­deed, that also could be a case, but I highly doubt it’s reas­on­able thing to do. Of course I won’t stop any­body try­ing to cre­ate new rules for fic­tional uni­verse, but it would in­volve long years of hard work to make everything at least a bit real­ist­ic. That would in­clude en­sur­ing new rules al­low cre­ation of stars, plan­ets, stable chem­ical ele­ments. After that en­sur­ing those ele­ments would be able to par­ti­cip­ate in a pro­cess of cre­at­ing other highly com­plex ele­ments we call or­ganic mat­ter and so on and on.

Fi­nal words

Even though there cer­tainly were some small mis­takes in the story, those mis­takes did­n’t pre­vent me from hav­ing fun play­ing this game. What ac­tu­ally sad­dens me is how people are still afraid of nuc­lear as if it was the most fear­ful thing con­ceived by our hard-­work­ing sci­ent­ists. It’s not in the scope of this art­icle though.