detonation of fuel tanks and fueltanks

[drymelon]

fire and closed container full of flammables would result in an explosion right?

well apparently not in all cases. the usual method to blow fuel tanks for a quick and dirty fire bomb is a fuel tank on top of paper or clothes lit by welding tools or a zippo

but what if i have flares? i tried shooting the 5000 unit fuel tank with a flare rounds shotgun and it doesnt explode, but if i put paper under it then shoot it, youd get an explosion. even though it ignites paper it doesnt ignite a container full of fuel?

i thought id be clever with was carrying a 400 unit fuel tank on hand to counter a fireball wizard, so if i went down and got fireballed i could potentially catch the wiz out too. except fireballs dont create the same fire conditions as burning paper which means the fuel tank doesnt explode.

it would be nice for fires to ignite stuff in a consistent manner so if i were to play around with black powder i wouldnt need to use paper as an ignition source.

also matches heat up paper like a container rather than out right burning it.

[medsal15]

Once I heated paper to over 1.000 Kelvins.

[Grifflez]

Something similar happens with shooting a fuel tank with a laser. Things you'd expect to dramatically ignite and explode a fuel tank and result in an action-movie fireball don't quite work like that.

Flares fail to ignite a fuel tank because they don't convey any heat unless they set something on fire (and they don't set objects on fire unless they hit the floor, which is being blocked by the fuel tank).

I don't think lasers even convey any sort of change in heat to objects/people they hit.

[Grek]

Also, on cogmap 2 the old reliable ways for making a fuel tank explode (Sparks from blown lights, lit welding tool underneath) seem less reliable. The sparks seem to set it off maybe a third of the time, and the welding tool needs a minute or two to get the tank hot enough. Dunno why!

[Grifflez]

Also, on cogmap 2 the old reliable ways for making a fuel tank explode (Sparks from blown lights, lit welding tool underneath) seem less reliable. The sparks seem to set it off maybe a third of the time, and the welding tool needs a minute or two to get the tank hot enough. Dunno why!

The sparks have to be on the same tile as the fuel tank itself. That's why sparks from an RCD don't set a fuel tank off (most of the time) but sparks from a light busting in the robotics storage room will cause an explosion (and then two more explosions when the fuel in the borg docking stations ignites)

[Grek]

Yeah, except it doesn't reliably do that anymore.

[Wire]

As a constant blob player: I've never seen it fail to work.

[Noah Buttes]

As an AI player who loves to strategically detonate fuel tanks when rogue: I've had it fail at several, extremely inopportune times.

[Vitatroll]

I'm a sp00ky jerk who likes to carry around mysterious boxes for maximum sp00ky. I've found that the resulting tubesparks manage to set off fueltanks quite well, often resulting in myself and others being made into sp00ky human candles.

Something to make note of is whether or not the fueltank in question is in a vacuum or not. I think sparks are just hotspots that heat the atmos. The atmos heats the tank. The tank goes boom. No atmos; no boom.

Then again I'm talking out my ass. Best to ask coder person thing.