The folks exposed died a few days after. So it wasn't instant. Very slow and horrible probably as all their organs and cells died at a molecular level and skin fell off.
So damage over time and can not be healed. Would be accurate.
If you tried to make one the size of the moon, it would blow up a bit past the time you got it to the size of an atomic bomb core. Or, if you did it slowly enough, it would go critical but stop being pure enough to explode.
Demon Core. It was meant to be part of a third nuclear bomb to be dropped on Japan, but after their surrender, the core was used in two experiments which both killed several people via exposure to lethal doses of radiation.
My favourite thing about that story remains that even if everything had gone to plan and he hadn't fully dropped the second half , it would still just be a couple of dudes with PhDs only slightly irradiating their own junk.
The first time this thing killed someone was because they dropped a brick on it. The second time this thing killed someone was because they were fuckin around with it using a screwdriver
Yeah reading the Wikipedia article, the drop is unfortunate but the screwdriver bit, what a fucking moron. And he regularly did this while others observed, like fuck me if you're going to be a dumbass, be a dumbass by yourself, dumbass.
Oh, for sure, the screwdriver was a "hold my beer" moment. The brick, though, I gotta disagree. While it was an unfortunate accident, we knew enough about radiation at that point to know even tiny accidents could delete you. Playing Legos around something I know could kill me in an attempt to ease it to the point of maybe almost killing me just sounds like a slightly better thought out way of asking someone to hold my beer
Look up demon core on Wikipedia. It was the core from a nuclear weapon. Some dumbasses decided to play with it in very dangerous and stupid ways and died.
except for the fact that it would be more like 50m at most, assuming that you count still living for 20 years, and the fact that the person wielding the weapon has already melted into a puddle of goo by that point, yeah. It's a weapon with a ranged attack.
Melee area effect weapons. There's a wand of fireball in Balders Gate 3 that is bent and has melee range. This is like that, but the fire is only analogous to fire and the effect lasts longer and does damage slower