Yeah, that's an interesting question.
I really built the model for the nukes for the larger nukes - 8t+ mostly.
Then it makes sense that anything which gets 'engulfed' in the fireball dies - for smaller nukes I agree it doesn't make as much sense, although I find the drop off between the insta-kill and the non-insta-kill far more concerning, not that I've ever see that be particularly noticable.
So, I do agree that there is probably a better system, but I'm not going to implement one in the near future for a few reasons:
- The current system works, and I'm a bit too busy to put a huge amount of effort into coming up with and testing a new system
- These issues only turn up in really extreme modded cases, and even then the weapons mostly act reasonably - I didn't build T-N for modded cases, I balanced it mostly for vanilla, so the fact it works as well as it does is honestly surprising.
- If you dislike this behaviour, you can always disable the super small weapons - they do stray much further from realism than the rest of the mod.
- I'm not actually convinced the current behavior isn't fairly realistic:
It isn't inconceivable that a small nuclear detonation would in fact do catastrophic damage to such a creature - remember the yield is quoted at 0.1t, so the detonation is equivalent to 100kg of tnt, which would probably be the largest amount of conventional explosives one could reasonably carry, even with the losses to different energies, better explosives, etc. It is not a small amount, and I don't know enough about biology to guess how large a creature one could kill with such a charge, but it would not be small - armor would help, but the shockwave would travel through the tissue, and do vast amounts of damage to organs internally. This would be particularly true with a weapon detonated at such close proximity. I'm prepared to accept that there are (biological) things it couldn't kill, but I'd guess that they would be many 10s of meters long - larger than anything I've seen in factorio.
Looking at this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale
as an example of using explosives on tissue, someone guessed that 4kg of dynamite would have been enough - say 0.01t equivalent, that person had explosives training, so lets go with their number.
The goal was to destroy the carcass enough for scavengers to eat it, so I'd presume the detonation would kill the whale if it were alive.
If 10kg of TNT would kill a creature say 15m long without armor, I'm going to guess that 100kg of TNT would kill a creature 15m long with armor, particularly with the super dense nature of the impact, and the fact that killing a living being isn't anywhere near as hard as spreading its body everywhere.
I'm pretty sure these numbers are still underestimating how devastating such an explosion would be, so yeah, I'd say it would kill the creature.
If you want some context on what 100kg of tnt looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vai5S0mI9u0
is 100kg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7-uJhssw_U
is 50kg.
Despite saying all of that, I would be happy to work out a better system with someone, I just don't have the opportunity to give much time to it for now. I've also just finished messing around with 0.3, and I'm feeling pretty happy with the overall state right now - it will probably be a while before I want to do another major rework.
