Q: It can't be depleted uranium, silly youtuber! A: It says "depleted uranium" on the box, so... Q: Depleted uranium is used as ammunition A: I said this. 34:48 This is the place that the line is programmed to try to reach, so just ignore the word "somehow"
no ones gonna read this but one of my fondest memories of HL is the fact that it took me like a decade after release to get a PC good enough to play past 30 fps and to this day i cannot get use to it, it doesn't make videos hard to watch but it does constantly trigger this "this doesn't look like real HL" thing in my mind kinda like an uncanny valley effect
I started playing ~16 years after release, and now I speedrun it. I upgraded my PC from integrated graphics to a GTX970 in 2016 and now I can't stand anything less than 100fps lmao
That was my experience but with Half Life 2. I had a geForce mx 440 which is directX 7 only card so all the graphics were very simplified. For example in the intro GMAN never goes transparent or changes colors, so all the moments where he is silent and translucent looked really strange, as if he forgot what to say, lol. Still, I'm pretty sure I did play at around 30 fps. My buddy had an even slower PC, he had pentium3 700mhz or something like that. I remember we played the leaked HL2 beta on lowest settings at ~15 FPS on his computer, that was running a bit faster than the full game.
A: I read this B: I remember as a kid, we had a playstation for myself to play and my parents would play point and clicks. The home PC was not meant for half life and yet I tried so hard to get it to run. It's weird because usually when you see a playstation game, it looks how you remember it because most people aren't showing emulated footage of it online. But with PC games, especially Half Life, we have moved so far past how I first experienced it, in all of its 640 x 480 glory that I don't feel much nostalgia for it when I see RU-vid videos on it, just like you said. I have the reverse for Half Life 2. I played it on the orange box in HD first so I have no nostalgia for the original look of the game.
I was always under the impression that the "energy ammo" boxes were just marked as radioactive and was more of a radioactive battery. The tau cannon to me was just a portable particle accelerator that required a ton of juice, usually particle accelerators use extreme magnetic fields to manipulate the particles. IRL depleted uranium is used in because of its mass making really heavy projectiles.
It's also not actually depleted uranium, as it says U-235 on the box; that's the fissile, very much *not* depleted isotope of uranium. If it *were* depleted, it should say U-238 instead.
My interpretation of the name was that the Valve devs looked up how railguns would work, found a detailed explanation of electrons, which then referred them to information on tau particles. Because tau particles are easiest to explain as heavy electrons, they came to the conclusion that a railgun using tau particles instead of electrons would be stronger/strong enough to work at all, because surely when they looked up railguns they found out that those things were garbage in 1998. The idea of being able to arbitrarily manipulate subatomic particles is also represented in what the gluon gun is implied to do. So basically, what if electricity but with Taus.
you're probably right. I do wonder if they stumbled upon Feynman diagrams and used those as reference too. Gluons are depicted as helixes in Feynman diagrams, which would explain the spiral design of the gluon gun's beam. The diagram of Tau decay, for someone who isn't familiar with Feynman diagrams, might vaguely look like a reflection/bounce of sorts.
They probably also just figured that a gun that fires a basic particle fits much better with the general vibe of Black Mesa which is like if you mixed the attitudes of Silicon Valley with the cutting edge science of CERN. And like it does make way more sense for a science facility to have some sort of portable particle accelerator than for them to have a railgun or gauss gun, both of which have no scientific applications.
despite having a faint idea on how the tau cannon worked from over a decade worth of half-life 1 experience (primarily deathmatch), i've spent weeks analyzing the code (keep in mind this was before i even knew about the HL Physics Reference) to better understand how the weapon functioned under the hood. i even went as far as to compile my own version of half-life to better visualize the TraceLines and record them for my own video (similarly to how they were shown during the penetration segment - i recognized all those TraceLines from my own clips lol) i wrote up a quick 1000-word draft some time october 2022 (15 months ago!), trying to explain to newer players in the simplest way possible how exactly the tau cannon worked (mostly for deathmatch, but briefly touching upon singleplayer as well). eventually i found out about the HL Physics Reference, realized i've missed out on some key details or was wrong about others (eg. selfgaussing). over the past year or so, i have tried to rewrite the script and re-record the clips in a way i deemed would be the easiest to understand several times with no success - all have been trashed because i felt like i just couldn't find a good way to visualize nor explain what was going on even for someone who has studied this weapon to a much-lesser-but-still-insane extent, i honestly had to rewatch some segments a couple times, just to make sure i was understanding them fully. nonetheless, this was an excellent execution and explanation of all the topics mentioned in the video (and thank you for lifting my "work on the gauss video already" curse, lmao)
If i recall correctly, the wiki suggests that it may be a tau particle accelerator, so it is a gauss gun, but instead of conventional projectiles it shoots particles, the gun also has a visible coil which seems to support this
@@chri-k The depleted uranium thing might be a leftover from when it was a Gauss gun since depleted uranium is actually a great material to use in a conventional projectile weapon. And at the time Half Life was being made the US was just about to introduce DU penetrators in their APFSDS rounds for the Abrams. Though I guess you can also use DU as a neutrino source, it's not a great one but it is a use.
I think we're just filling in blanks meant to be blank, if you really fired tau electrons at stuff they would either go right through stuff harmlessly or form exotic particles with the target, so like...the results would depend strongly on what you actually fired at I guess? With water probably being the scary thing to not shoot it at.
You are the modern age marphitimusblackimus. Incredible how much information the tau cannon really gave us; enough for 50 minutes worth! Love your work, and I can't wait to see what other single weapon documentaries you could make! Perhaps discussing the biological weapons such as the handheld barnacle or the spore launcher would be of interest.
silly little energy gun was cooking alot more than i thought. superb video my guy, the depth you are going into keeps increasing, excited to see whats next
The flight is now a day late. I still haven't finished this video, but now after a good night's sleep in a hotel provided by the airline, I'm ready for more.
@@WDC_OSA yea his vids are great for that as they are long most of the time and i can even watch em without headphones and volume thanks to the subtitles
Depleted uranium is, as the name implies, depleted of most of its valuable energy. It does have real applications for firearms in that anti tank munitions like 120x570mm M829A4 APFSDS anti armor rounds are made of depleted uranium simply because depleted uranium has an incredibly high density while being relatively cheap. Its also "self sharpening" in this application. Tungsten penetrators deform at the tip as they enter armor, depleted uranium rounds crack and shatter in a way that keeps them sharp. DU particles will also become heated during penetration of heavy armor which can cause them to ignite. This pyrophoric effect is incredibly devastating to whatever is behind the armor youre shooting (usually the inside of an enemy tank)
Also as some other people have pointed out: depleted uranium is not U-235, it's U-238. That's literally what makes it "depleted" uranium, it's uranium that lacks the fissile isotopes in any meaningful quantity.
I was speaking with a friend of mine about this weapon the other day, and he knows a little more about physics than I do. He suggested that the weapon is actually hyperaccelerating a lepton particle down a straight lane. Because it's a particle, it's weaving between the molecules of the matter it touches with very little friction, but it's bringing with it all of the physical effects of displaced matter as it goes, thereby imparting violently destructive energy. It seems like the developers of Black Mesa would agree; careful study of the whiteboard in the lab seems to reveal as such.
Tau particles are leptons. And if you do accelerate something to a high fraction of the speed of light it is possible for it to just pass through most matter without interacting. The biggest problem is that Taus have the same charge as electrons but about 3000 times the mass so accelerating them up to this kind of speed would be nearly impossible. I do want to take out my notes and calculate it because I bet the voltage needed to accelerate them up to say 0,9999c in such a small gun would be absolutely absurd.
Not that it matters because you should upload whatever you want to make, but I'd be really into more super comprehensive breakdowns of half-life weapons. I hardly gave the tau cannon a thought but this was super interesting
Really well made video, legitimately fascinating. (the reason gargantua take damage from displacer cannon shots is because you're teleporting its organs away 😔)
these videos scratch the itches that the critters under my skin leave. Also little side note: depleted uranium is actually used as AP ammo. It has some weird special properties that make it suitable for it. Also you flash up u-235 when talking about depleted uranium (u-238) idk if that was you or valve that did that, but amusing nonetheless.
also an additional note: assuming there is u-235 in the tau canon, that would imply it's used for power generation, which would be the logical use case. Unless you wanted to fire amusingly dangerous projectiles i suppose. The thing is though, you would want to use basically any other isoptope easily available to you, like pu-238/pu-239, pretty much anything other than uranium is going to be more optimal. The only use case i know of highly enriched uranium being used for is naval reactors. Both the soviets/russians/ and US used/use highly enriched uranium fuel, more so the US. Though some new reactors also want more highly enriched fuel as well. There was a recent plant finished/started (something like that dont quote me on it) built for producing uranium fuel with enrichment up to 20% (which is still lower than naval reactors, those are like 70-90%)
It's really cool all the research and experimentation you did, but I was really hoping this would all be about the lore and in-universe science behind it
Not even a week ago I was searching high and low for a video detailing the mechanics of the gun (mostly for my interests in learning HLDM and how this gun became so prolific) and I was so disappointed that there was basically one video w no commentary that was very brief and then a random video demoing some wallgauss spots on cross fire. Now here you are making my dreams come true again w lovely HL content. Massive thanks ❤❤
I was killed by the beam that penetrates the wall on my first playthrough, i shot the barrels before the beam did too so it was the beam, not the boxes. I allready knew about the cutscene so i found it halarious
I don’t know how you didn’t know that was the tau cannon beam coming through the wall, it’s really recognizable and one of my strongest memories from my first play through. Getting that gun was the best part of the campaign!
The glowparticle also displayed, and the charging sound is a dead give away for the secondarry fire in option. Don't don't know, people tend to not listen to details, so I am almost not even effected by that he did not recognise this faster.
@@danielbedrossian5986 I’m affected, this man is clearly no slouch and a decently intelligent person. But he is human so I was just taken aback when he admitted that. It’s unexpected compared to the rest of the video.
if the title is real pls go outside, its very nice i begin to get sad for 0 reason when i don't for a few days ( i used to spend a TON of time inside during lockdown and the difference is amazing ) i'll actually watch the whole vid someday, sounds like an interesting thing to have on the background while coding or smth
Quite incredible how a single weapon has so much to talk about. Name, design, development history, in-universe lore, game mechanics, optimal usage, bugs. So much stuff! I think the only thing missing is a slightly deeper dive into the development of the weapon, like interviews with the OG Valve programmers, artists, etc. Probably another half hour of material there and you'd have a full length documentary... for a single weapon.
The Tau Cannon/Gauss Gun names were used interchangeably in HL1 multiplayer mods that had it available, everyone knew what you were talking about. Same for the Egon/Gluon gun. Most experienced players knew how to use both, shooting through walls and floors with the tau cannon, gauss jumping or damaging players on the other side of walls or the egon gun damaging through walls and floors/ceilings. A good HLDM match was usually pure chaos.
the video was already amazing (and fully subbed, too?!? hell yeah) but the very end really did just. multiply my overall enjoyment several times over, wonderful work
I mean, it can teleport the enemy to its death, just like the scientist you get the Displacer from and you in one of the crush depth levels (that technically also features another scientist that is about to die due to a Displacer mishap).
spent days watching this on and off because it was so much information to process at one time. your tau cannon knowledge accompanied me through many nights and days, many meals at my desk. thank u youtube man
27:05 - "Encountering void when it shouldn't be possible" Entirely depends on how the map is built. "detail" objects like crates can be worldspawn, which is the world itself. They can also be brush based entities like func_wall. So if the brush the crates are made of are not tied to an entity, their volume can be the void. The HL engine is very flexible in this regard, so you can have inconsistency even within the same map where some crates are worldspawn and others are tied to a brush entity. Since the engine has no concept of rendering optimization, the mapper has to do it manually, so there are cases where you want worldspawn detail brushes to block rendering visibility to increase in-game performance. If you want to block sections of the map from rendering from certain other points in the map, you have to carefully plan out rooms so that the renderer won't render those certain other points. I've been making HL engine maps for 25 years, and it took me years to develop an understanding of the inner workings of the HL engine. After awhile, you can basically predict how the engine will behave in most cases and it becomes so ingrained in your thought process that you no longer have to actively think about map design optimization.
I just wanna give props to you for all the effort put into this video, incredible job dude. I especially love your work with the graphs to show the damage rampup over time. Great wirj!
RE: the weapon's introduction setpiece in Questionable Ethics, I'm just commenting to say that "you could plausibly mistake it as having come from the crack in these machines, anyway" was indeed what happened with me. Even though I discovered the penetration feature via deathmatch, I never refactored my original interpretation of that sequence, so I was surprised when you showed it penetrating the wall.
My biggest gripe with the best weapons in half-life is how small the amount of time you can even use them, is. Thanks to black Mesa team for correcting that problem for me
Not to be a nerd but gauss is actually pronounced like how you'd say mouse (gouse) due to it being named after a german scientist named Johann Carl Fredrick Gauss
multiple focused lasers are often used to compress micro materials such as air or any other kind of small material that would be too hard to compress using traditional mechanical forces. this could be used in relation to some of the alien life forms tissue samples but any idea of specifics go out the window after that
The red glow decal from the Tau Cannon and Stalkers in Half-Life 2 did used to fade away over time in older versions of the engine. That's something that broke with one of the updates.
I thought I knew everything about Half Life but I never saw anything about the Tau cannon being removable from the buggy. Very interesting ! BTW, The second uranium based weapon in Half Life 1 also has two names. It's either Gluon or Egon. I always called it Egon as a kid, I think that's what it's called in the game files (weapon_egon, right ?) Not sure where the Gluon name comes from. The Egon name is based on the character from Ghostbusters, right ?
Huh. I always thought the spinning-thing on the Tau Cannon and the Displacer Cannon was supposed to be a centrifuge. Those are used in real life to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238, so there's some logic there. I swear I read someone else on the internet call it a centrifuge, so I'm surprised no on in the comments has mentioned it. My extremely unscientific theory was that the centrifuge spins and separates molecules that really really want to stay together. So when it stops spinning, the molecules snap back towards each other, creating a large burst of energy that's focused into a beam (or a portal). As for the gluon gun... yeah a centrifuge doesn't apply there, the theory falls apart. It could be a reference to how gluons are (according to the wikipedia article I just read) a subatomic particle that has "a spin of 1" so the spiral could be gluon particles "spinning" around the beam. You can trust me, because I am a scientist and Half Life is extremely scientifically accurate, as we all know /s
"A quick look" Me, sleep deprived as fuck but is being kept alive from the 10 shots of espresso i have this afternoon : Yeah maybe sleep is for the week.
2:13 the cylinder at the front is hollow, so the central metal bar would just act as a catalyser (?) Anyway when there's conflicting lore, I always like to find a way that fits both views, the tau canon launches via electromagnetism tau particles that it gets from the uranium ammo.
I usually assumed the gauss-tau gun was shooting a laser, probably involving a xen crystal; and for a while before I understood the significance of depleted uranium labels or bothered to look up how both gauss, and tau works, I thought there was some sort of isotope in depleted uranium that was an important catalyst for the reaction in a "hey its top secret experimental tech" kinda way. There are unused (and comically large) isotope boxes that may have been originally used for ammo for either the gauss or gluon, but as you said without any canonical tie in we can't know what they were intended for.
i cannot believe that i just watched this entire video, including going back a couple times to listen to something again, only to get to the end and be forced to hear you say what you said with my own ears. 10/10.
Fun fact: On the box it says „U-235“ which is in fact the exact opposite of depleted Uranium. Depleted uranium is Uranium depleted of U 235, so mostly U 238. So it suffice to say, valve didn’t really know about depleted Uranium.
4:57 based on the fact the weapon is still in testing in the Lamda Labs, likely for use on Zen's hostile creatures, I find it possible it is in biological research for testing on the creatures of Zen, seeing as how they have contained some Zen creatures in the labs
The reason why Gauss guns are named after him is because Gauss did a lot of work with magnetism. So much so that the unit of measurement for magnetism in physics is a Gauss
Excellent informative video, really on par with a true serious documentary (and I'm not even exaggerating). Please, it would also be great if you talked about other interesting weapons in the game, only the ones that are human, of course, such as: the already well-known Gluon Gun and one of my favorites of human technology: the Displacer Cannon, from Opposing Force.
In Half Life 2, Just before you transition to "We don't go to Ravenholm", you can hold the door Dog opens for you with two stacked barrels, when it "shuts" again the model will act as normal but the collision will be stopped and held by the barrels, letting you pass through as you please. This does absolutely nothing.
the answer for everything is rule of cool. marc laidlaw even said that stuff like the dried oceans was rule of cool and had no official explanation in hl2
2:45 Considering that tau particles have a lifespan of about 290 femto seconds (which is basically nothing), they'd need to be accelerated to a significant percentage of the speed of light because otherwise they would basically decay before they leave the gun. 4:29 I'm pretty sure that Valve doesn't know what depleted uranium is, since it says both "DEPLETED URANIUM" and "U-235" on the box which doesn't make sense because uranium with a high concentration of U-235 is considered enriched while depleted uranium contains almost none U-235 and instead mostly consists of U-238.
12:24 It's important to clarify that the Tau only ends up being more ammo efficient IF we are doing right click tap fire shots. Primary fire is less ammo efficient than the Gluon gun and the fully charged shot is marginally more efficient at the cost of a severe drop in DPS and ease of use. The amount of ammo conserved is not worth having a 0.5 delay per shot.
Worth noting that depleted uranium IS particularly interesting as a *projectile* because it is incredibly dense compared to other rounds. In the real world it's commonly found in armor-piercing and anti-tank rounds. It would not be usable as an energy source (hence the "depleted" part of "depleted uranium")
It is a gauss gun, depleted uranium is a dense material so it should pierce walls if accelerated, the bullet hole isnt in the gun due to polygon limitations, a beam of energy would probably ignite the oxygen around the weapon wielder if its powerful enough to pierce a thick brick wall instantly. Uranium is not the energy source, its the batteries in the gun model, the gun doesnt load multiple munitions at the same time, it probably relates to energy used to accelerate, the gun has a very obvious electromagnetic coil (copper ring) around the barrel
