Somewhat plausble but mostly fun not-RIFTS Scifi weapons

[deaddmwalking]

To be clear, only neutron and proton pew pew radiation will irradiate things yeah? gamma rays and x rays won’t make stuff they hit radioactive, yes?

That's basically right, but just because something is radioactive doesn't mean it is particularly DANGEROUS to you. Bananas are radioactive. Getting a chest X-Ray is deliberately exposing yourself to approximately 10 days of 'background radiation'.

When you knock a neutron loose from an atom (or add one), you're likely to end up with an unstable atom - it's likely to 'stabilize' by radioactive decay.

Most Carbon in the world is Carbon 12 - it's about 99% of all carbon in the world. Carbon 12 has 6-protons and 6-neutrons. If you knock a neutron into it and it 'sticks', you have Carbon 13 - which is also stable. It'll be a heavy atom, but it's fine... On the other hand, if your neutron 'knocks loose' a Neutron, you end up with Carbon 11 which IS radioactive (it decays to non-radioactive Boron with a half-life of 20 minutes).

Induced radioactivity happens when you take an element that's normally NOT radioactive, and you destabilize the atoms by (usually) adding or removing neutrons. When you create a radioactive element this way, it does matter what TYPE of radioactivity it emits. As you saw from the article, some types of radiation are easily blocked by normal clothing and pose little danger for life.

A neutron bomb would make Zinc very radioactive and very deadly (with a half life of 244 days), but MOST MATERIALS don't have a strong reaction. It's quite possible that if you wait a day or two you're going to be able to steal all the enemy's equipment, and your soldiers will probably die of cancer in their late 70s.

[Orca]

Just a minor thing I think is worth mentioning - if you're talking about beams of particles rather than a nuclear bomb, neutrons don't just float around freely. They're not stable unless part of an atom's nucleus. Any means of generating them is going to be messy enough that you don't want it within arms length of your body, and a few meters of concrete between you and the generator would be better.

[OgreBattle]

In Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, advancements in micromachines (which are thousand times bigger or so than nanomachines and more plausible) are used to clean up radiation and are the basis of cyborg (brain stuff too) technology:

https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Micromachines

Now, how could a micromachine actually clean an area of radiation poisoning? Is repairing damaged DNA strands actually plausible?

[Username17]

In Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, advancements in micromachines (which are thousand times bigger or so than nanomachines and more plausible) are used to clean up radiation and are the basis of cyborg (brain stuff too) technology:

https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Micromachines

Now, how could a micromachine actually clean an area of radiation poisoning? Is repairing damaged DNA strands actually plausible?

No machine no matter how small could plausibly alchemize radioactive waste into non-radioactive material. It's radioactive because it is unstable on an atomic level, and rearranging the atoms ain't going to do shit about that. However, you could very plausibly collect all the radioactive atoms and move them somewhere else. Cellular or subcellular machinery could very plausibly collect all the atoms of one or more types, and those could be heavy metals or radio-isotopes or both.

It's difficult but not impossible for micromachinery to distinguish between radioactive Iodine and non-radioactive Iodine. Radioisotopes have exactly the same chemical properties as their non-radioactive versions. They are distinct in terms of mass, and that makes them perform different to centrifugation and potentially to other physical actions.

There already are micromachines that repair DNA strands that have been damaged by radiation. They are Protein Complexes. They have a number of limitations, but the main issue is that in order to be fully effective they require the other strand of DNA to be intact. This means that if radiation damage is so extensive that it cuts both strands at the same time, there's no repair possible. It also means that if the cell attempts to divide (and therefore separates the strands) before the repair complex is finished working, everything falls apart.

This is why radiation is much more damaging to your GI tract than your brain. It's not that radiation is somehow more damaging to the DNA in your gut than in your head, it's that the cells in your gut divide very frequently and neurons divide almost never. That means that DNA strands in the neurons have a lot of time to wait for the DNA repair mechanisms to fix nicks caused by ionizing radiation, and the DNA strands in stomach lining do not.

Anyway, there are people who have more or less DNA repair complexes operating in their bodies. People who have Xeroderma Pugmentosum have so little ability to repair DNA that even brief exposure to sunlight is extremely harmful. There's every reason to believe that you could do 'nanotech stuff' to make people more resistant to radiation on a cellular level. Probably more efficient to develop a hormone pill that induces cells to make more of the DNA repair proteins they already make, but it's plausible technobabble either way.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

So let't talk plausible...

Frank is right that chemically, a radioactive isotope of an atom behaves exactly the way a non-radioactive isotope behaves... And no matter what chemical compound you put them in, they remain radioactive. But existing technology developed PRIOR to the detonation of the atomic bomb exists to separate atoms based on minute differences in weight. That is, if a radioactive isotope is radioactive because it has one extra neutron, or radioactive because it has one fewer neutron, it's possible to separate them - usually by running a mix that contains both isotopes over and over again until it gets progressively more pure.

There's a Link about this process.

The thing is, separating atoms out like this probably can't be done by a 'minute machine'. I don't know that anything smaller than a lab centrifuge would have any hope of working....

Now, if you DID have the ability to separate the isotopes, near future tech probably could render them non-radioactive. If adding a neutron might create a stable atom, it's possible they could individually isolate atoms and add that missing neutron to make it radioactive. Alternatively, some isotopes have a very fast half-life, and some have a very slow half-life. It's possible that, if the radiation decay wasn't going to create MORE radioactive material, you might try to turn it into a material that decays into a non-radioactive element very quickly.

Regarding radiation treatment, bone marrow transplants are the current best option available. The undamaged bone marrow will create blood cells that prevent you from dying in days/weeks from the inability to produce viable blood cells. In future tech, synthetic cells and/or DNA stitchers that are based on a full-genome DNA test from your youth might be possible. Such a technology would also open the door for eternal youth - your DNA strands - for lack of a better term - decay over time. If you could reconstitute your DNA strands on molecular level based on how they were when you were twenty, you would eliminate that decay and the signs of it (like wrinkled skin) would also disappear. The ability to build a DNA strand on the molecular level seems plausible, but it would be extremely difficult. Our bodies are SUPER GOOD at identifying and eliminating gene-sequencing errors which is why we don't all have cancer ALL THE TIME.

A normal cell has 3 BILLION base pairs. Getting it 99.9% right will yield genetic monsters that may appear completely inhuman. Gene therapies for youth that sometimes turn people into monsters might be exactly the thing you need for your game.