A successful run through the red team’s base. Nobody saw you, until suddenly, an enemy spawns behind you. You take a quick look back, and you realize to your dread, it is a Freeze. Already having equipped your double armor, you cannot activate a DP to one-shot it. With no one around you to help, you face an inevitable conclusion. You are not going to be making it out alive.
Freeze: the counter balance to Firebird, which (obviously) freezes tanks instead of burning them. Flash-freezing is a fairly underdeveloped science form, with very few real life examples of technology similar to Freeze. Some of these include freeze-drying, dry ice, cryogenics, Liquid Nitrogen, and freezer burn. This means that there is a larger possibility for pseudo-science than with the more tried-and-true flamethrower. And so, without further ado, let us dive into the frozen depths of the science behind Freeze.
Le Science Behind Freeze’s Projectiles.
The concept behind Freeze is cool but highly impractical, considering the extremely low temperature of “ammunition” compared to the temperature of the world. This fact is not helped by the lack of current technologies that are related to low-temperature freezing, beyond the home refrigerator.
There are two possible “projectiles” for Freeze that I can think of. One is dry ice, and the other, Liquid Nitrogen. However, it is much more plausible to use Liquid Nitrogen because it is much colder, made at -320.440F, forcing all handlers to wear protective gloves, goggles, and clothing. This temperature guarantees that it freezes everything it comes into contact with.
Effects Of Freeze: In Real Life
So what effect would a Liquid Nitrogen-powered Freeze weapon have if Tanki were in real life? Well, the incredibly low temperature of the Nitrogen would cause it to evaporate almost instantly, giving it the well-known spray visual. It would also allow for the incredibly aggravating freezing effect. Metal, like just about everything, shrinks in the cold as the atoms slow down and move closer together.
However, due to the rapid expansion of Liquid Nitrogen when it comes into contact with anything at a higher temperature, the Liquid Nitrogen becomes a gas. (174.6 times the original volume), the metal would rapidly begin to crack and break, causing even more, damage and even total destruction of the tank. Moreover, any wiring and mechanical parts on the interior of the tank that came into contact with the Liquid Nitrogen would be decimated. The massive decrease and following increase of volume could permanently destroy the wiring due to the sudden changes. So if the tank was not made useless by the initial burst of Nitrogen, it would still be unable to move or use its turret, much less the hull, to get away.
Real Dewars for holding Liquid Nitrogen
Considering the rapid expansion of Nitrogen as it changes from a liquid to gas, the turret would not create a nice clean cone. Instead, it would create a cloud of gas constantly moving out from the turret into the more spacious air. This would cause a faster evaporation than before, creating an even smaller range than the typical freeze. While the range might be decreased, the impact is lessened by creating a massive cloud of white that would not only freeze a tank but impair vision. This mechanic would allow for a large cloud to freeze a tank; and with the impaired vision, it would be impossible to escape.
Freeze: How Does it Work?
As mentioned, Freeze is a unique turret, and its design works quite well with my hypothesized functioning. There are multiple necessary parts of the turret needed for the loading and firing mechanism. Each part of the turret needs to be in place for success, so let us start with the chassis.
The first part is the insulated containment of the Liquid Nitrogen. To do this, the actual turret would have to be vacuum sealed, to prevent leakage and loss of gas. To minimize heat intake, the interior would have to be lined with silver in order to lessen the impacts of thermal radiation - which would begin to warm the Liquid Nitrogen into its gaseous form, making it worthless.
Another important part of Freeze is the storage location of the Liquid Nitrogen. A difficulty with Freeze is that it has no easily observable Nitrogen storage area, unlike Firebird which has a quickly definable fuel cell. Through close observation, I determined that the only logical place was the center, between the fan and “barrel”. This allows easy access to the “barrel” and is really the only place to store Liquid Nitrogen.
How and where does the Liquid Nitrogen come from? Needing to be massively cooled, I hypothesize that the fan serves a dual purpose, one of which is reloading. This means that it will suck in and filter air into just the Nitrogen, and then cooling it to the -320.440F, so that it can be used. So, the middle Nitrogen storage area also has to have some sort of micro blast chiller, and it would have to use massive amounts energy to use. This is the other important part of the fuel placement. With the centered fuel cell, the fan is able to pressurize the containment area. This means that Freeze does not need to exert extra power to push the Nitrogen farther forward as it is pre-pressurized.
However, to actually use Freeze, you have to expose it to the outdoors, or more importantly, some sort of heat to create the aerosol style spray. Moreover, the fan can not pull in the air and fire at the same time. The vacuum seal has to be closed, but the fans need to be still running to add in Nitrogen and pressurize. This is probably not included in Tanki Universe Freeze, as then there would be no stealth involves with it, making it fairly useless considering Freeze is normally used by sneaking up behind at tank before attacking. It is fairly hard to sneak up on someone with a leaf blower.
Finally, how does this turret “fire” the Nitrogen? To make it easier to understand, I have broken this into steps.
The barrel of the turret itself has to have a vacuum seal on it, otherwise, the Nitrogen would constantly leak out and make Freeze worthless. The seal would have to be able to open and close.
While the seal is closed, the fan is still spinning, allowing for pressure to build, allowing a stronger thrust of Nitrogen. Once the seal opens, the fan in the back propels the Liquid Nitrogen forward along with the extra pressure. As it passes through the seal and turns into a highly cooled gas, able to cause the catastrophic effects that we know Freeze to have. The seal closes and turret reloads and repressurizes. Repeat.
So, in conclusion, does Freeze act that differently in real life when compared with Tanki? No, not really. Freeze feels underpowered in the game, but according to my investigations, it would be way too overpowered (OP) if it followed my findings. However, the developers did not (intentionally) base Freeze off anything, so they had no predetermined ideas to base off real life. While I am presuming that Freeze is based off Liquid Nitrogen, the developers did not, so this is entirely based off how it would work in real life and its effects on Earth. Regardless, have fun playing with Freeze and flash-freezing your opponents until their inner workings are decimated!
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