Good Uses for Uraniam?

[meieratlarger]

I have a nice little ice sheet base humming along and <wham> a uranium meteorite. Now I know what I /can/ do with uranium, but I was wondering what would be a /good/ use for 600+ units of it.

What are your thoughts or suggestions?

[ASS]

no good uses except trading.

[Praeceptorem Poloniae]

Escrito originalmente por Dire:

Uranium is good for blunt weapons, flak helmets and walls. The only thing stronger than uranium walls is plasteel walls, but those are flammable

AFAIK, plasteel items were made not flammable in 1.1

[Astasia]

Escrito originalmente por gimmethegepgun:

Escrito originalmente por Astasia:

Once you get deep drilling

I've never done ice sheet before but I'm pretty sure you can't deep drill there.

Nah you can deep drill on both ice sheet and sea ice. I don't know if you can drill up chunks on sea ice though, but scanning for resources and drilling those resources works fine.

[GeneralVeers]

Escrito originalmente por dergefata:

Presumably because there's neither oxidation nor 235 enrichment tech for it.

If three stranded colonists can come up with a Johnson-Tanaka drive and energy weapons, I'm sure uranium enrichment wouldn't be a problem. :)

WARNING: IMMINENT FOURTH-WALL BREACH.

But the truth is, Tynan simply didn't add enrichment to the tech tree, for whatever reason. Probably he figured nuclear war just wasn't part of what he wanted to build.

[Praeceptorem Poloniae]

Escrito originalmente por GeneralVeers:

But the truth is, Tynan simply didn't add enrichment to the tech tree, for whatever reason. Probably he figured nuclear war just wasn't part of what he wanted to build.

But for what modders are if not to add/change things in the game - sure, Tynan left nuclear option (both power and weaponry) for whatever reason he had, but modders do a great job of filling the gaps (and going over-the-top bonkers)

[Astasia]

I've just assumed all the uranium in the game is depleted. Chunks of ship armor or munitions, used mostly for shielding in machinery and pawn armor.

You have compacted steel, plasteel, and machinery, which are clearly wrecks, building and space debris that have been buried. It would make sense if it was the same with uranium, being depleted uranium used in various military and civilian fields, with no realistic way of enriching it anymore. For whatever reason though uranium is the one thing the game calls "ore" in the raw form, so I don't know if that logic really works. I can't think of a good reason raw uranium ore wouldn't have the normal amounts of u235 in it.

[dergefata]

Escrito originalmente por GeneralVeers:

If three stranded colonists can come up with a Johnson-Tanaka drive and energy weapons, I'm sure uranium enrichment wouldn't be a problem. :)

Please, my PINS can't boil rice without giving themselves lethal dysentery. Tell them to cook up some yellowcake uranium and I guarantee they'd just eat it, assuming anything called cake is in fact cake.
"So you're saying this is a very high-calorie Twinkie?"
"...technically, sure."

Escrito originalmente por Astasia:

I can't think of a good reason raw uranium ore wouldn't have the normal amounts of u235 in it.

I hate the "but realism" argument as much as the next guy, but "normal amounts" of U235 is consistently 0.7% of total Uranium in a deposit; and unlike, say, pulling gold out of ore, you can't just pour Special Juice on a shiny rock and have the good stuff fall out. If a realism argument is in any way compelling, then I'd say it's because, realistically, you need a complex dedicated procedure to enrich Uranium to weapons-grade. Until you get above 20% or so, you can't meaningfully make it go boom, and if you're not using an implosion design like Teller-Ulam type fission->fusion(->fission) two/three-stage bombs, you need to take it to more like 60%-80% at least to ensure it's not a dud.

[GeneralVeers]

Escrito originalmente por dergefata:

"So you're saying this is a very high-calorie Twinkie?"
"...technically, sure."

Ya know, a lot of stuff I buy at the grocery store has the word "enriched" somewhere on the label. I'm sure there's somebody in the real world who sees "enriched uranium" and thinks.........

.........

Yeah, that's a rail I kinda don't want to be on. :)

[Astasia]

Escrito originalmente por dergefata:

I hate the "but realism" argument as much as the next guy, but "normal amounts" of U235 is consistently 0.7% of total Uranium in a deposit; and unlike, say, pulling gold out of ore, you can't just pour Special Juice on a shiny rock and have the good stuff fall out. If a realism argument is in any way compelling, then I'd say it's because, realistically, you need a complex dedicated procedure to enrich Uranium to weapons-grade. Until you get above 20% or so, you can't meaningfully make it go boom, and if you're not using an implosion design like Teller-Ulam type fission->fusion(->fission) two/three-stage bombs, you need to take it to more like 60%-80% at least to ensure it's not a dud.

I'm not saying I want nukes or fission power in the game, I'm fine without it. I was just explaining my own head-canon, and the flaws with it. I will continue to believe it's all depleted uranium.

Logically, yes, the complexity and tech required to turn raw uranium into a nuclear weapon or power source is likely centuries beyond the little scrap colonies we are building. Except, we have a handful of uneducated and stranded, or even tribal, pawns being able to build literal antimatter space ship drives using scrap materials they dug out of the ground with their bare hands, after just a few months of researching at a desk. So the game has tossed out the excuse that something is too hard or complex for our pawns to do. Antimatter is leagues beyond uranium enrichment in complexity and danger.

[Cheet4h]

Personally my headcanon always was that with all the ancient and abandoned technology on the planet (remember, you can find compacted components enclosed in rocks), researching isn't inventing that information from scratch, but rather investigating artifacts, analyzing partly-corrupted databases, interfacing with some kind of satellite- or nanite-based internet and other stuff like that.

[dergefata]

Escrito originalmente por Astasia:

I was just explaining my own head-canon, and the flaws with it. I will continue to believe it's all depleted uranium.

Antimatter is leagues beyond uranium enrichment in complexity and danger.

Yeah, I find it pretty easy to hand-wave almost anything away - head-canon, as you say. I can't imagine how nuclear bombs would be manageable in the game, and I'm happy not to have to worry with them. Hell, my last colony got fully wiped out by a single rabid turtle on day two. There's no way I'm worried about nukes ;)

I do have a thought experiment for you, though. Is antimatter absolutely harder than nuclear bombs?

Gliders or kites are really simple, right? You don't need modern materials to make a glider or a kite - though they help - and yet there was no aerial warfare in ancient Rome or Greece or China (where they were flying kites before Julius Caesar was born) or Egypt or Central/Southern Africa. The atmosphere hasn't changed so much in 2,000-2,500 years that they couldn't have flown - they just hadn't had the thought.

If you went back just 200 years and told someone, "Hey, if you pound sand down into very thin sheets and stack them carefully you can hold lightning in a box" they probably would have carted you off to an institution, but simple silica dielectrics have made capacitors that rival the chemical energy density of Lithium-ion batteries, and that doesn't actually need modern technology to hack together in a simpler and less-efficient fashion. We just hadn't had that thought before maybe 20 years ago. (Well, we'd had the thought, but hadn't turned it into a useful reality).

Maybe in 100 years antimatter will be so easy our grandkids will wonder why we ever struggled with it. The demonstration of magnetic vacuum containment, combined with modern 3-D printed magnets, may well bring antimatter to the household scale. Maybe we just haven't had the right thought, yet.

[HeyItsAlex]

Escrito originalmente por Cheet4h:

Also, if you don't need it, just sell it to the next bulk trader. No need for the stuff to sit around in your storage, and selling things lowers the value of your colony, which results in weaker raids.

Doesn't the value of your colony include the silver you'd get from selling it?

[brian_va]

Escrito originalmente por dergefata:

Gliders or kites are really simple, right? You don't need modern materials to make a glider or a kite - though they help - and yet there was no aerial warfare in ancient Rome or Greece or China (where they were flying kites before Julius Caesar was born) or Egypt or Africa.

how much weight were those kites/gliders capable of carrying. if we assume its a one-way ticket for the guy dropping the bombs (controlled landing not required and someone has to pull the lever or kick them over the side), were these kites/gliders capable of carrying a grown man and an appreciable amount of ordinance from ground to a useful height reliably enough?

[dergefata]

Escrito originalmente por HeyItsAlex:

Doesn't the value of your colony include the silver you'd get from selling it?

Yeah, but you should get less than 100% value for the item you sell, so the total colony value should drop by whatever the difference is between item value and item sell price. You can also always offer more than the buyer can pay in exchange, and take reputation in exchange for silver value, IIRC.

[dergefata]

Escrito originalmente por brian_va:

were these kites/gliders capable of carrying a grown man and an appreciable amount of ordinance from ground to a useful height reliably enough?

Yes.
Check out, for example, "man-lifting kite" on Google/Wikipedia/whatever search you like. They weren't common until after 1,000 AD or so (Marco Polo writes about them, in fact), but they were in heavy use by the 1600s.