BattleTech Race Style ?

[Suicide Junkie]

I thought the reactors were fusion reactors not fission. from what i remember of the description of them they worked (scifi technobabble description of course) by shooting a deuterium pellet with lasers to the point of a fusion reaction that was contained in a magnetic bottle.

Fusion via pellets is a pretty good design, and realistic given the beastly lasers you have available.

Magnetic bottles are just that; magnetic fields. They can't be "breached", though they could be distorted by an EMP (if not for the big metal faraday cage of a mech they're carried in) or the generator (big electromagnet?) could be disabled.

Fusion is hard to start, so you'd only get one of the pellets fusing during your explosion. (Ie: the one that was burning at the time.)
And since the reactor can handle these things going off steadily during combat, it certainly isn't going to be a city buster (Note that the magnetic bottle will hold charged particles, rather then neutral ones, so there will have to be a decent physical container too.)

[ March 31, 2003, 03:42: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]