The Heik said:
There is a difference between suspension of disbelief and bad writing. The Element Zero fields of Mass Effect is suspension of disbelief because it's the thing that establishes the difference between the real world and the fantasy world and that it is established as fantastical. The Catalyst from the same game series though is bad writing because it contradicts both basic logic and the canonical information that has been provided or implied throughout the series.
And unfortunately DKR had way too much of the "Catalyst" type of fantastical things. The nuke(and it was a nuke by the actual description from the film) blast radius that I stated in my OP is just the primary blast radius, where every thing is obliterated by the sheer concussive force of the bomb. The secondary blast radius would stretch out several more miles and would still likely kill most people directly hit by the shockwave and destroy anything that's not a reinforced concrete structure, and that doesn't include the fallout radius of the radiation that's been thrown into the atmosphere.
To put this into perspective, the Fat Man nuke that was dropped on Nagasaki had a 21 kiloton yield, leveled most of the city and rendered the general area around it uninhabitable for decades. The DKR nuke is 4 megatons (4,000 kilotons), which is 190 times more powerful. Had it detonated over Gotham directly it would not only have destroyed it and everything it in but put most of the State it's a part of in mortal peril from the fallout. Batman could have put the bomb on an SR-71 blackbird and flown away at three times the speed of sound and he STILL could not have been able to get Gotham safely out of the danger zone in one minute. The yield that the movie stated the bomb had is simply unreasonable given the parameters the film gave us.
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5.Actually it is a nuclear bomb the movie itself used the words "neutron reactor" (which baffles me because they say it a clean energy source, which I think Chernobyl might have a few things to say about), and real life has those (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor ). It's a nuclear reactor, so all the rules that apply to one in real life apply to the one in the movie if they want to make it believable (which they should considering the semi-realistic setting of the film series). And I honestly cannot believe that any engineer would be dumb enough to make a power source that can be turned into a bomb capable of LEVELING A CITY with a few buttons presses. The minute that came up in development that project would have been axed faster than you can say "political shitstorm".
As far as the nuclear bomb goes, for one it was a fusion reactor, not fission, not neutron reactor, a Fusion reactor. It
is really big news, and basically the answer to the worlds energy problems if we ever got it working. It pretty much creates no radioactive waste, runs on very little fuel, and cannot self-sustain a reaction, so there's zero chance of accidental meltdown. I don't know whether making one go nuclear would have any different effects than a regular nuclear explosion, but it could be concievably argued that it won't create any radioactive blast, And as for the 6 mile blast radius, I assumed he dumped the plane+bomb in the ocean once he got a good distance away, to drown the reactor sucking out it's energy, which would decrease the radius somewhat. Although I will admit that it was one of the weaker scenes, and having to come up with excuses like that for it just goes to show. Maybe it was an impossible mumbo-jumbo, but there are just too many unknowns that theoretically it could be perfectly possible, at a stretch.
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