The Oppenheimer Lance is the most physically faithful weapon ever built for Factorio. It does not shoot a projectile. It stores a nuclear-scale charge in capacitor banks, fires a beam across up to 10,000 tiles, and dumps that energy into a growing sphere of ionized plasma. The sphere collapses, holds, and releases as a fireball at up to 48,000 K spawning a shockwave that ignites the ground utterly destroying anything in it's path.

It sweeps out to a 2,000-tile radius on a single Lance, following the same blast-wave mathematics that describe real detonations. Everything at the center is annihilated. The rest of the disc dies by the numbers: overpressure contours from Brode's 1955 fit, thermal burns falling off with the inverse square of distance, biters, nests, and trees each taking the dose the physics says they should.

WHAT YOU'LL SEE

The strike: A beam of charged plasma crosses the map. Its colour is the blackbody colour of the temperature it has reached, so a larger shot burns whiter and hotter.

The blast: A Sedov-Taylor shock front, fast out of the fireball and crawling at the rim, exactly as it moves in real air. Lightning arcs off its edge on Space Age installs.

The ground: Rock is painted by the peak heat it saw. Molten lava at the centre, cracked and glowing volcanic stone around it, folded ash at the edge. Then it cools tile by tile, on a solved heat model of conduction, radiation and latent heat, for as long as a real crust would take.

The crater: Dug and rimmed using Glasstone & Dolan's The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. Shallow water boils off under the fireball.

THE POWER

One Lance draws 36 GW and can be aimed anywhere from a 30-tile pop to the full 2,000-tile shot. Link several and they converge on one target, adding pressure and heat rather than an unmanageable crater size.

BUILT FROM REAL PHYSICS

Yield derives from the crater's real size, so the fire-control panel and the ground can never disagree. Damage is anchored to published lethality thresholds, so a 1% shot kills as hard at its centre as a full one; yield buys reach, not dose.