Season 4
EP05 - Chemical Gas (King of Friendly Fire)
Discover why chemical weapons became notorious as the king of friendly fire in WWI. Learn the chemistry of chlorine and mustard gas and why atmospheric unpredictability made them as dangerous to users as to targets.
S4-EP05: Chemical Gas (King of Friendly Fire)
I hate this meta! I hate it! We've been poking each other for ten hours!
Nobody can push! If I step one pixel out of the trench, the machine guns instakills me! There are no team fights! Just infinite chip damage!
My teammates refuse to surrender. The enemy refuses to push. I am stuck in this match. I can't leave this game without losing ELO!
Why did the devs have to ban the Toxic Smog item?!
It was the only AoE weapon that could clear these stupid trenches! But no, the forums cried because it was "too cruel," and the devs removed it!
Who cares if it's cruel?! Just let me war-crime their backline so I can finally go to sleep!
A ten-hour stalemate where defense outscales offense, and any forward movement results in a one-hundred-percent casualty rate.
Are you talking about the meta of the Western Front of World War I?
It turns out that the generals trapped in that lobby are complaining about the exact same thing as you.
The invention of the Maxim machine gun and rapid-fire artillery created a hard-lock on the server. Every offense gets punished so hard its impossible to push.
Kinetic projectiles (bullets) require a clear line of sight. If you dig a hole, the bullet cannot hit you. You break the raycast.
So you're stuck. You can't shoot through dirt.
Exactly. The generals were bleeding millions of units just to move the front line a few hundred meters. They desperately needed an exploit to bypass the terrain geometry.
They needed a weapon that didn't fire in a straight line. They needed a weapon that behaved like a fluid.
Gas! It's heavier than air! It ignores line-of-sight! It sinks directly into the trenches where the enemy is hiding! It's the perfect AoE counter to a turtle meta!
On paper, yes. In a vacuum, it is the perfect weapon.
But you are assuming you have complete administrative control over the weapon's hitboxes.
A gas attack runs on the environment's physics engine. And Earth's physics engine does not care about your uniform.
Let's look at the data structure of a bullet. A bullet has a fixed vector. You point the barrel, you pull the trigger. Physics dictates it will travel in a linear direction.
Because you control the vector, you control the targeting. A bullet has a built-in Friend or Foe tag. It only hits what you aim it at.
Gas has no vector. Gas has no team affiliation.
When you open those valves, you are releasing a pressurized fluid into an open atmosphere. It doesn't travel in a straight line. It expands based entirely on ambient barometric pressure, temperature, and wind.
So you just wait for the wind to blow toward the enemy trench, and then you open the valves! You can just pray for the Eastern Wind like Zhu Geliang or watch out for weather forecast!
"Check the weather forecast?"
You are fighting in a zone where millions of tons of high explosives are constantly detonating.
Every explosion creates a massive thermal updraft. Every crater changes the local air pressure. You don't have a "weather forecast." You have a localized, chaotic micro-climate!
Oh...
April 22, 1915. Ypres. The wind is finally blowing towards the enemy. The commander gives the order.
The valves are opened. 160 tons of chlorine gas are released.
For exactly three minutes, it is the miracle weapon you dreamed of. The enemy frontline collapses.
See? It worked! The trench is cleared!
And then... the barometric pressure shifts.
The holographic soldiers in the trench are cheering, waving their rifles in the air as the green cloud moves away from them.
A slight change in temperature. A momentary gust of wind.
The wind recalculates. And the payload returns to sender.
It... it turned around. It team-killed them.
Friendly fire isn't an "accident" with chemical warfare, Shez. It is a statistical probability.
Once it leaves the tank, you no longer control the weapon. The weather controls the weapon. And the weather has no loyalty to your flag.
They deployed a weapon that was just as likely to wipe their own team as the enemy...
Do you finally understand why it was banned by the Geneva Protocol in 1925?
Your forums lied to you. You think we banned gas because humanity suddenly developed a moral compass? Because gas was "too cruel"?
We drop white phosphorus. We drop napalm. We invent thermobaric bombs that vaporize lungs. We blast sonars that drowns underwater divers.
We banned gas because gas is a weapon that disobeys the chain of command.
A weapon that relies on the wind is mathematically unreliable. You cannot plan a grand strategy around a weapon that might decide to execute your own frontline infantry because a cloud passed in front of the sun.
Sigh. I think I'll just take the ELO penalty.
You should wait for the next patch before playing again, hopefully this boring turtle meta gets patched.
S4-EP05: Chemical Gas (King of Friendly Fire) (END)
EP04 - Biowarfare (Infinite Scaling DPS)
Explore biowarfare as a weapon with theoretically infinite scaling damage potential. Learn why pathogens are the most cost-effective weapons ever conceived and why their uncontrollability makes them uniquely catastrophic.
EP06 - Aerial Superiority (The Z-Axis)
Understand how aerial superiority added the Z-axis to military strategy and became the decisive enabler of modern warfare. Learn why no major offensive succeeds without air cover and how air power reshaped ground doctrine.
