Chapter 40 - The Largest Atomic Test in World History (Patreon)

When I was contemplating how Gothic would go about destroying the Forge, my answer was 'old school.'  This was an interesting article I found in my research.

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So I was once again in a situation where I needed to blow up an extremely dangerous and truly gigantic alien installation. Thankfully, unlike all those Federation fuckers in the shows, I learned from my past mistakes and didn't repeat them over and over again and act surprised when it came up again. Since my mission on the Collector moon-sized vessel, I'd looked into what kind of explosives I could safely obtain and keep on hand for just this kind of situation.

Unfortunately, getting a hold of tricobalt explosives was not going to fly, even with my Section 31 connections. It was a heavily monitored substance and I'd set off every alert in every intelligence organization throughout the alpha quadrant if I tried to get ahold of some, especially since I was a scary Augment. I didn't need any more scrutiny; I had plenty enough as it was. So, instead of going modern, I went old schooland built myself an H-bomb, or a hydrogen bomb, the atomic bomb’s more advanced cousin. I named it Shiva, the Destroyer.

Common radioactive materials like uranium and plutonium were far easier to obtain when you had a galaxy full of star systems and asteroid belts to find them in. For some reason, those substances were also far less tracked than the more modern stuff. Add in holographic design, advanced precision replication, and all the bomb design specs from a slew of planet's historical databases, meant that it hadn’t taken me all that long to build something that would explode with incredible force. Thank goodness the people of this time were so lacking in creativity and blind to the effectiveness of old tech and solutions.

I was still leery about having a giant nuclear bomb in my armory capable of killing me if someone got their hands on it and managed to activate it, so I put in a ton of safeguards that meant that only I could set it off. If anyone messed with it, it'd vaporize itself before it exploded. You could even fire at it multiple times with a phaser rifle and it wouldn't do anything. You could drop it from space to a planet and it still wouldn't go off. I even installed three different triggering mechanisms, electronic, mechanical, and chemical, so even if the dampening field had still been in effect, it still would have worked. The thing even had a variable yield setting, essentially by making the design less efficient, so it could go from a 50-megaton yield to over a 1,000 megatons of explosive force. A quantum torpedo, for example, had a maximum explosive yield of about 100 megatons.