T0ad 0f Truth said:
The heat of the radiation burst would vaporise the outer armor of the Reaper near where it hit due to the close proximity of the "blast." This would cause a "pressure pulse" damaging other parts of the reaper. The radiation could also potentially cause damage to the organic parts of the reaper when the bit of the hull is melted. It wouldn't be effective the same way as it would in a non vacuum. but it would be far more effective than having to take down the shield first or having to get close enough to use lasers.
This... probably isn't the right place to discuss this. I have a horrible feeling this could get quite in depth. The thing is, you're making a lot of assumptions here. We have absolutely no idea what Reaper armour is made of. Or what their internal structure is like. We have no real data on what they can and cannot withstand, and therefore you can't just casually claim what an intense burst of heat would do to them. You've also got something wrong here for sure. The point I was trying to make earlier is that nukes don't give off a lot of heat in space, they can only radiate and heat radiation is fairly low energy - which is why we can use it to operate a TV from the couch without all getting skin cancer. Most of the energy released in the nuclear reaction will be transferred as X-Ray and Gamma radiation. While that would, if detonated at close proximity, likely be very lethal to the organic crew of a ship, we have no way of knowing whether or not it would penetrate far enough into a Reaper to hit whatever 'bit's of a Reaper are organic (we don't even know how that works).
All we can do is conjecture, and in that spirit allow me to offer up the Collector base. We can presume the Reapers built it, we
know it was built with Reaper tech. It's located at the galactic core, and seemingly has no issue with the immense amount of radiation there. If they can withstand that, it's likely they can withstand a quick burst from a warhead detonation.
Indeed, looking back at your original argument, you've made an erroneous leap of logic. In short, it doesn't matter so much what quantity of energy is releases, it's how efficiently you transfer it to your target. The stats for the energy released in terms of 'bombs dropped on Hiroshima' should take into account that both the unit of measurement and the H-bomb figure you quote are derived
on Earth. The Hiroshima bomb expended it's energy in an approximate hemisphere where it could impart a massive amount of kinetic energy to the surrounding air and ground, a dreadnought shell transfers three times that amount of energy, directly and linearly into its target, and it does so within a much, much smaller radius. In terms of energy intensity, that's a far, far greater order of magnitude than just 'three times as much'.
So, with your concept that three dreadnoughts match one Reaper, and firing together produce 9 times our yardstick bomb you have to bear in mind that
all of that energy is transferred into a tiny fraction of the Reaper's surface area. That H bomb of 1000 times greater yield (again, that's an in atmosphere comparison, and not valid in a vaccuum, but let's use it anyway as an absolute upper bound) is going to be expending that energy
radially in a perfect sphere, and it's incident on the Reaper over a much greater percentage of its surface area. Therefore, the amount of energy impacting on an area equal in size to that impacted on by the slugs is only going to be a tiny percentage of that 1000*base unit. Without some hard numbers, I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't imagine the energy intensity of that H-bomb is going to be much larger than the dreadnought shells.
Ugh, you see what I mean? It got way too in depth...
T0ad 0f Truth said:
The speed that the railgun allows the nuke to be fired will greatly reduce or eliminate their potential to be shot down. The guardian lasers are primarily used to take out the disruptor torpedos which are slow moving because they use mass effect fields to break through a barrier.
You've made another assumption here. Do we
actually know how kinetic barriers work? And even if we can draw conclusions from gameplay, they're not necessarily reliable thanks to gameplay and story segregation [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GameplayAndStorySegregation]. Just because during gameplay, an explosive fired from a Falcon rifle detonates on contact with a shielded Cerbie Centurion, doesn't mean that's what had happened were the 'physics' of mass effect fields allowed to run the plot. Regardless, we can't extrapolate from personal kinetic barriers the performance of Reaper cap ship barriers. The point I'm taking a horribly long-winded route to get to is that we don't know if a slug fired at a Reaper's shields just squashes against the shields and floats off, or whether there is a perfectly elastic collision involved and the slug ricochets off. More than likely, it doesn't. But we don't
know for sure. Therefore we can't necessarily predict the behaviour of a nuke fired at those shields.
T0ad 0f Truth said:
If a ship has been destroyed by a Reapers thanix cannon, then the only real problems would be for ships right near them. Without close proximity the hull won't vaporise to cause any damage and the ships would be shielded from the radiation. It could be a potential danger for fighters, but ship designs and tactics could fix it.
You've missed my point here. Putting aside the fact that, according to the codex, ships should be nowhere near close enough to each other for the explosion of one to jeopardise a neighbour, my concern wasn't what happens after the ship is destroyed. The point I was making is that a shot, from a Reaper or otherwise, that would normally only damage a ship if it struck the inert ammunition storage would become fatal if it was instead housing nukes.
I will stress that I'm not sure if being struck by superheated, superaccelerated metal would set off a nuclear device. If it doesn't, this isn't an issue. But I'm offering a potential drawback to the use of nukes.
My point, I suppose, is that this is a work of fiction. Given just how casually the Reapers break many established laws of physics already, it's incredibly easy to come up with plausible plot conditions as to why nukes don't work on Reapers. You're saying it's a plot hole that the Alliance doesn't just use nukes to beat Reapers, I'm saying the fact they don't implies it doesn't work - and that in a work of fiction as loose with science as Mass Effect, it's much easier to offer reasons why something doesn't work than to insist it should. Especially when your reasons for why it should aren't even that sound in a world of true-to-life physics.
EDIT: Final thought, something for you to run with. We're told that military starships use matter-antimatter reactions to provide thrust, that this is obtained from massive supercolliders positioned near and powered by stars. Why do we not see matter-antimatter
bombs? Or even matter-antimatter tipped shaped charge slugs fired from rail guns? Expensive? Probably. Awesome? HELL YES!
