Head canons for cold ammunition?

[oddlittleturtle]

I interrupt your daily ME squee with 'Herp Derp*: the Quantum Physics Edition'.

Does anyone have any specific headcanons with regards to cryo rounds from ME1 or cryo powers from ME2 and 3? Or do you just hand-wave it as game mechanics? How do you see it working if you don't hand-wave it? For Cryo Rounds/ammo: What does the ammo block look like?

Comments

Primary mission objectives accomplished.

[oddlittleturtle]

XD

[sinvraal]

Prepare for ass-talking, I'm just thinking out loud

[arysani]

Your ass-talk is making mad sense to my half-science garnered from watching lots and lots of History Channel, Military Channel, and Discovery Channel specials in attempts to bond with my dad.

I LIKE IT.

[oddlittleturtle]

Yay! ass-talking! Thinking out loud as well.

I'm more for a mod to the gun with the ammo staying the same. Insta-frostbite burn from handling a largish block of nearly absolute zero stuff sounds counter-intuitive to combat objectives. And painful as hell for the unlucky (and quite possibly stupid) soldier.

I have trouble wrapping my brain around snap-freezing a whole person too, which is why I wondered about a net-like scenario where the target is encapsulated in a thin, yet super-cooled burst that effectively drops the surface temperature, causing damage with only the outward appearance of being frozen.

But then that poses all sorts of other questions. First and foremost, how does that even work if the particle is shaved off, ran through the mod, super-cooled, and shot? Unless there's a second mechanism that encapsulates it using a second shaving. Then the ammo block would run out faster and thus cryo mods are only used for extra special occasions or reserved for specific specializations...

Edit: because what is punctuation

[sinvraal]

You wouldn't necessarily need more "stuff" in the form of an additional round... we're talking about bosons, a class of particle even smaller than an atom. And it's a state of matter, not a particular kind of matter. Like ice isn't a different kind of stuff than water, just a different state.

"A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter of a dilute gas of weakly interacting bosons confined in an external potential and cooled to temperatures very near absolute zero."

So... the laser chamber actually changes the matter state of the round (or at least its outer shell) from solid to this condensate. The non-condensate mass of remaining matter is what carries the super-cooled BEC to the target, where it strips heat energy from whatever it comes into contact with until it reverts to a normal solid. This sudden critical temperature shift causes nasty damage to almost any surface due to very fast molecular structure changes. Though, the conductivity of the material would probably have an effect on the extent of the damage.

[joasakura]

I hate thee with the passion of a thousand space hamsters humping wildly in the night

First off, i just want to say that your rant made me snort soup up my nose and try to pretend to my coworkers that I wasn't trying to stop myself from laughing hysterically.

space magic aside, is it possible this isn't an ammo block, but rather encapsulated rounds? I mean, I'm not sure at all what you could possibly jacket space magic condensate in that wouldn't freeze up in the gun (although it would be interesting to think that you can't leave cryo rounds chambered in your gun due to long-term damage)

[oddlittleturtle]

So many mission objectives accomplished today. XD [ 2/10 - masseffect Hysterical Laughter Achievement - 15G ]

I would like the idea of encapsulated rounds if they didn't have to carry them and it went against lore. ME1 specifically has ammo blocks that tiny pieces are shaved from.

[joasakura]

I can't wait to see what that trophy looks like XD

so is Bose-Einstein condensate maybe like some sort of super-stable liquid nitrogen?. Maybe, like sinvraal says above it's a mod, a snap on chamber that coats your ammo block splinter in space magic goo that's held at a stable temp by the mod.

at velocity (due to temperature), the goo starts to warm and expand, drawing heat from the surroundings- although it's still far colder than anything else, and boom, plop, supercold ice coating?

I dunno. flailing. HUM.

[oddlittleturtle]

Bose-Einstein condensate is an altogether different form of matter. And is so far above my education level, it is not even funny. I call it gaseous because they've super-cooled a gas to get the condensate. They did experiments a few years ago where they achieved the first photon condensate, but that hurts my brain even more... What I understand... what I think I understand about the quantum state of the particles involved is that one particle can occupy the same space as another particle and... and that's about it. Then complicated maths and other weird shit happens and I get confused. LOL

And ooo: boom, plop, supercold ice coating after hitting a certain speed sounds awesome. So much simpler than OH GOD SPACE MAGIC AND NUMBERS HELP HELP

[mechapotatoalex]

Never really gave much thought to how Cryo Ammo actually worked, but it does lead to some interesting situations with named enemies.

I ended up using it on Tela Vasir during LotSB, Liara hit her with Warp, and she shattered into a million pieces - but of course was fine...well....not fine, but you know what I mean....during the following cutscene.

[oddlittleturtle]

O.o
She thawed out and grew back together quite quickly.

[tov01]

The exact same thing happened to me in my first fight. Gameplay and story segregation, I guess.

[framlingem]

I can't comment about exactly how cryo-ammo works, but my headcanon is that it has a shorter effective range than incendiary, because of the friction of air heating it up as it travels.

[oddlittleturtle]

That makes a lot of sense, actually.

[framlingem]

I'm not sure, though. When I think about it, given how cold that ammo has to be (or maybe it contains a chemical which catalyzes a rapid cascade endothermic reaction with water... though that would kill someone straight out, they wouldn't unfreeze), the number of joules imparted by friction over the distances involved in a firefight, even for sniping, would probably be negligeable. Depends on the specific heat of whatever the rounds are made of.

Man, Ms. Barnes would be proud of me. Look at me, remembering my high school chemistry.

[oddlittleturtle]

When put that way... yeah, I'm not sure that it would be noticeable. Rounds are described as metal, but it's not specific what kind of metal. One of the metals currently used in experiments to produce Bose-Einstein condensate is sodium-23, so...

You are so lucky to remember high school chem. I only remember feigning sickness to get out of having to learn logarithmic equations since we were also learning them in algebra 2, and the teachers had conspired against us that semester. I also remember the entire class trying to cheat off me on a test and me failing miserably so the entire class failed miserably. 30 people failed that day. To this day, I have no idea what that test was about... probably logarithms. lol