CBC : Nuclear Cannons

CBC: Nuclear Cannons

Adds three nuclear-flavoured shells to Create: Big Cannons: a fission shell, a thermonuclear fusion shell, and a radiological dirty bomb. The first two dig real ray-traced craters and throw up a mushroom cloud; the dirty bomb doesn't destroy much, it just makes an area unpleasant to stand in for a while.

A radiation system runs underneath all of it. Radioactive blocks and items raise a dose counter on every nearby entity, dose causes staged sickness, and there is gear to detect, flush, and shield against it.

Built for Minecraft 1.20.1 / Forge. Requires Create : Big Cannons.

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The three shells

	Fission	Fusion	Dirty bomb
Crater radius	~150 blocks	~230 blocks	none (a 5-power TNT blast)
Mushroom cloud	yes	yes, larger	no
Fallout zone	7.5 min	15 min	6 min
Contamination cloud peak	15 rad/s	30 rad/s	3 rad/s
Fallout	heavy	heavier	sparse (30% at centre → 6% at edge)
Role	tactical strike	strategic strike	area denial / harassment

The fission and fusion shells are expensive on purpose — they sit at the end of the uranium enrichment chain. The dirty bomb is deliberately cheaper, but it is not a budget nuke: it barely damages terrain and its radiation is low and short-lived. It exists to make a patch of ground annoying to cross, not to erase a base.

Fission and fusion also deliver a burst of instantaneous neutron/gamma radiation at detonation (see Shielding against the flash). The dirty bomb has no flash radiation — only the lingering contamination.

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What a detonation looks like

• A vanilla blast for the immediate punch, plus a much larger ray-traced crater that is processed over several ticks (so it doesn't freeze the server).
• The crater is layered: vitrified atomic slag at the bottom, scorched soil and charred wood toward the rim, overhangs collapse.
• A Citadel-rendered mushroom cloud, a screen flash, and camera shake on clients near the blast.
• Entities inside take distance-scaled damage, get set on fire, and are knocked outward.
• Afterwards: a fallout zone, a spreading contamination cloud, and fallout laid on the surface.

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Radiation

Radiation is tracked on each entity as an absorbed dose in rad, stored persistently. Dose only ever matters as the accumulated total; the environment adds rad per second and your body (and RadAway) slowly removes it.

Where dose comes from

Every second the game sums, in rad/s:

1. The 16×16×16 chunk section you stand in — radioactive blocks inside it, plus a contamination cloud. Block radiation from the six neighbouring sections is counted at 35% after an air-permeability check, so a source just across a section boundary (or under your feet at the wrong Y coordinate) still reads correctly. Solid walls and lead block this neighbour bleed; open air doesn't.
2. Radioactive items you carry — the whole stack, capped at 16 items per slot.
3. Loose radioactive item entities within ~1.2 blocks.
4. An open-air fallout zone — only if your head can see the sky. Roofs, trees, caves, and being underwater keep this one off you.
5. Surface contamination — the contamination effect you get from stepping on fallout or standing on irradiated blocks.

What the numbers actually are

A few representative source strengths in rad/s:

Source	rad/s
Uranium nugget	0.15
Uranium ore / ingot	0.30 / 0.45
Uranium dust	0.55
Enriched uranium dust	3.0
Enriched uranium ingot	3.6
Uranium block	3.6
Atomic slag	5.0
Fission core	8.0
Fallout / scorched soil	1.0 / 0.10

Carrying a fission core unshielded adds 8 rad/s. The first sickness threshold is 100 rad, so that is roughly 12 seconds of exposure before symptoms start — don't keep one in your pocket.

Armor

The anti-radiation suit reduces absorbed dose by a flat percentage, piece by piece:

• Helmet 15%, chestplate 25%, leggings 20%, boots 10% — 70% for the four pieces.
• Wearing all four grants an extra 15%, for an 85% cap.

Each piece's reduction is shown in its tooltip. Note the suit reduces ambient dose (blocks, items, zones, contamination). It does not reduce the instantaneous flash from a nuclear detonation — against that you need mass between you and the fireball.

Sickness stages

Stages are cumulative: reaching a higher stage adds a new effect and raises every earlier effect by one level.

Accumulated dose	Effects
100 rad	Nausea I
200 rad	+ Mining Fatigue I, Weakness I
350 rad	+ Slowness I, Hunger I, Poison I
500 rad	+ Wither I, 2 damage every 5 s
700 rad	+ Wither II, 4 damage every 3 s, bleeding
1000 rad	fatal

Dose is cleared on death, so respawn starts clean.

Shielding against the flash

The instant radiation from a fission/fusion blast is ray-traced from the detonation point to your eye position. Every block along that line attenuates the dose exponentially (10^-attenuation):

• Lead block: 0.20 per block
• Reinforced concrete: 0.06 per block
• Water: 0.04 per block

A lead-lined concrete bunker with water around it will stop nearly all flash dose. It will not stop the crater, the heat, or the fallout that settles afterwards. This shielding applies only to the one-time flash; ambient section radiation is deliberately not shielded by blocks (it is already gated by section air fraction).

Getting rid of dose

• Natural metabolism clears up to 0.2 rad/s at full health, dropping to nothing below 10% health.
• RadAway is an instant purge, not just a buff: using one removes 150 rad immediately, then grants a 30-second effect that clears another 4 rad/s (up to ~120 more). One injector pulls you most of the way out of stage 4 or 5 if taken in time, but it cannot save you past the 1000 rad fatal threshold and it won't stop fresh dose while you keep standing in the source.
• Sleeping removes 20 rad on a natural wake.
• Milk removes 8 rad, but has a 10-second internal cooldown — chugging milk is not a cure.
• Submerging in water washes off the surface-contamination effect.

The Geiger Counter right-clicks to show both the section's ambient rate (rad/s) and your accumulated dose (rad).