u/IskanderM50KT

This is something I was wondering about recently. Let's say NATO used a B61-4 against an attacking armored force (wiki says the max yield is 45kt). How many tanks would such a weapon actually be expected to destroy or incapacitate?

Google tells me a modern tank battalion would typically cover between 2 and 5 miles of frontage. Playing around with nukemap tells me that with an airburst optimized for 20 psi of overpressure you'd have a blast radius of a little over half a mile. Serious radiation would have a radius closer to a mile and for serious burns (presumably not applicable to a buttoned up tank crew) the radius is two miles.

This makes it seems like realistically a medium sized tactical nuke could take out maybe couple of of companies worth of tanks. That's less impressive than I thought. I understand it would absolutely gut any supporting infantry and supply columns, so you'd have a bunch of tanks on their own. No infantrymen to protect them and no fuel or ammo resupply. Am I missing anything here or are nukes not as effective against armored forces as we'd imagine?

My first X2 play through was on Soldier difficulty and relatively easy. I decided to give the game a second go and did it on Veteran this time. At first it didn't seem that much harder but the first terror mission kicked my butt. There were aliens on three sides of my dropship as soon as I landed and this was the first mission where I had to face Androns and Servitors.

First try I got crushed so I save-scummed and tried again. This is where I really learned the power of smoke. My soldiers all had several smoke grenades and those allowed me to slice the battlefield up into smaller parts and deal with the aliens one or two at a time. I'd played X-Com and Jagged Alliance when I was lot younger but smoke is way more important in Xenonauts than I remember it being in any other game. On Soldier I mainly used it to try to capture aliens alive but on harder difficulties it's invaluable when it feels like you're being overwhelmed.

Is there any reason now to use grenades inside UFOs in Xenonauts 2? I haven't played a game like since the original X-Com in the 1990s, and I remember in that game you wanted to be careful blowing stuff in UFOs up because you could destroy sources of Elerium-115. So far that doesn't seem to be an issue in Xenonauts but I wonder if I'm missing anything.

What are people's favorite fiction books about a hypothetical nuclear war? Like most people on here I've read Arc Light and found it an entertaining read. I also thought enjoyed Jim Clonts's For Alert Force. Are there other similar reads out there? I'm fine with somewhat clunky self-published book (Clonts's book was a good example of that!) as long as the author mostly knows what they're talking about.