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 UA-cam 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Really well made video, legitimately fascinating. (the reason gargantua take damage from displacer cannon shots is because you're teleporting its organs away 😔)
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
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.
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 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.
This mechanic is extremely difficult to observe at any point in the game, since it's not like you can see through walls. You'd need to explicitly shoot it at a wall with an enemy you know is behind it solely to test if it works. No other weapon in the game has this capability, so assuming that the single cutscene demonstrating it does indeed show the shot going through a wall seems like a violation of Occam's razor. The crack-in-the-wall explanation proposed in the video is what I assumed when I saw the scene, since Half-Life doesn't exactly have the greatest visual fidelity anyway.
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
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).
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!
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.
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 bug at 27:00, i'd imagine that's just a quirk of how the map collision geometry is modeled. like, it's conceivable that under those boxes there just isn't any floor collision like there normally would be. but maybe i'm just stating the obvious
"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.
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
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
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
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
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 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 ?
I'm sure you put a lot of work into this and I did watch the whole thing, but somewhere around the 32 minute mark all of the words sorta just started to fold into each other and it became this sort of pleasant white noise. Maybe this is how ASMR operates for those it works on? Thank you.
9:40 lmao the vortigaunt on the launch pad i've never seen that once in all my halife playthroughs he glitches the fuck out too so i dont think it's intended either.
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.
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.
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")
We don't know at what stage of prototyping the tau gun was, so perhaps it was functional enough that the xen expeditions were already doing more "practical" testing, explaining the tau gun we find at the top of lambda core
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
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"
@@jeanbonpompei392 because you think of it as angry, there is no tone in text
Those are not questions in the Q&A, truly incredible
@@alt1763 And because YT comments are so often "ackshooally" type comments, or incompletely thought out, or just flat out wrong. :(
@@hateraccoon5686 what does "sweaty" mean???? I hope it's not too hot for them.
The box says "depleted uranium", but also says "U-235" which is not depleted uranium.
Depleted uranium would be U-238
oh wow, valve really labeled their box of magic nuclear ammo both "depleted uranium" AND "U-235".
maybe the box is a battery that depletes uranium & thats just a materials warning label
@@bekkayya but there's already AA/A batteries powering the rotating mechanism and possibly the gun itself
Valve, please fix.
It’s depleted uranium 235?
@@Pacman009Depleted Uranium by definition isn’t U235, its U234, or whatever molecules are left after the atoms have been split
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.
Me, an intellectual: Intentionally plays HL in lower settings for years for the proper feeling.
@@bazooka93 the hd models just look so... 🤮
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 UA-cam 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.
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.
Aren't muons heavy electrons? Or do they both do the same thin? (except Taus have a much shorter Half life.)
@@frndrmn A tau particle is an even heavier electron
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.
a much shorter WHAT? @@frndrmn
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.
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.
Depleted.
@@swgclips03let the man delete his uranium
@@swgclips03 departed
Deported uranium
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.
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)
Could you tell us what HL Physics Reference is, and where to find it?
@@CallOfCutie69 it's the first link in the description
@brokenphilip really went, "While you were out having fun, I was studying the tau cannon."
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
This seems like the most reasonable explanation to me
So it has a built-in nuclear reactor for power, and Valve didn't figure out that depleted uranium is well... depleted.
@@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.
@@hedgehog3180 that's probably the case
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.
Magical to see where that check of reflecting the shot into yourself paid off.
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
>A Quick Look
>50 minutes long
It's gonna be a fun evening for me.
Yeah I just noticed the length of the video and had to see if anyone else had that thought.
havent finished this yet but i wanna say right out of the gate thanks for the subtitles, they're very helpful for following along
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.
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
I'd like to see him do more in-depth videos like this.
Same, I would love to see equally comprehensive breakdowns of other HL weapons (and maybe even HL2 weapons!).
The helix-like effect of the gluon gun's beam is most likely a reference to how gluons are depicted in feynman diagrams.
Or it looks like the Ghostbuster proton pack.
@@-Zakhiel- this. the weapon's internal name is even weapon_egon after the character from said movie.
This is one of the longest setups for a punchline I've ever heard. Well played
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.
Really well made video, legitimately fascinating.
(the reason gargantua take damage from displacer cannon shots is because you're teleporting its organs away 😔)
"Gordon doesn't need to hear all this, he's a highly trained professional"
15:27 "we need to talk about parallel universes"
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 love the Tau Cannon so, so much! It is so fun to use both in combat and in movement, and I use it for both pretty frequently.
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
bro just made a 50 minute deep dive and called it a "quick look"
now that's professionalism ❤
"""""quick"""""
thanks for the new longform vid! great for background videos when doing art etc
I think just about the only thing i'd love to also hear about is how does the Tau Cannon weapon from the 2003 leak function compared to HL1/HLS
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.
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 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.
This mechanic is extremely difficult to observe at any point in the game, since it's not like you can see through walls. You'd need to explicitly shoot it at a wall with an enemy you know is behind it solely to test if it works. No other weapon in the game has this capability, so assuming that the single cutscene demonstrating it does indeed show the shot going through a wall seems like a violation of Occam's razor. The crack-in-the-wall explanation proposed in the video is what I assumed when I saw the scene, since Half-Life doesn't exactly have the greatest visual fidelity anyway.
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
12:34 The direct hit of the displacer gun, TELEPORTS the main target, it doesn't kill.
It makes the enemy someone else's problem.
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).
@@Ze_eT
The alternative fire teleports you, but not to your death, just a random location.
Though can teleport high up in the air somewhere
@PerfectAlibi1 he just happened to teleport way too high
@@rafaelhines1178
Ah, yes silly me.
it can teleport you way up in the air as well XD
I’ve always assumed the reason the Gluon gun has that ring is because of the Feynman diagrams for gluons
Proton pack.
@@-Zakhiel- no. gluons.
@@burger1505 The gluon gun is the proton pack... I don't know how you can't see it. It's even alled the Egon gun in some files of the game.
@@-Zakhiel-there’s gluon in the name.
@@-Zakhiel-It’s called the Gluon Gun
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!
I appreciate the subtitles. thank you.
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.
The fact that rail guns are real is news to me.😅Thought it was just from Quake.
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.
I played HL DM and one guy was killing me all the time with the tau cannon. At least now I understand how he did that. Thanks!
That´s what you call a quick look?
I call that an analysis!
Good video, lad.
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.
9:40 first time seeing vortigaunt using launch pad
mate i appreciate the devotion you put into this so much
Very quick look 👍
Really great video !! would love to see a full in-depth deep dive video on this weapon aswell : )
I’m impressed with how much information can be gleaned from this gun alone! Great video!
the bug at 27:00, i'd imagine that's just a quirk of how the map collision geometry is modeled. like, it's conceivable that under those boxes there just isn't any floor collision like there normally would be. but maybe i'm just stating the obvious
Oh wait, I see, it's that you can penetrate it on two sides and can't on the other two sides. Weird.
Valve would never have something like this blunder happen again! Anyway off to another shift with my beloved weapon_irifle
oh fuck yeah, thank you pinsplash we love you
Very quick look!
Lol at the subtitles comment in the description, was the first thing I checked.
"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.
Bro, you are absolutely insane for making this, thank you.
Bro sacrificed 2 months of his life to deliver an hour-long, scientific-class video essay about a gun from two games that are 20+ years old.
Legend.
the dedication is so impresive
job well done 😈
Thank you for your insanity
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
excellent video & great cackle at the end
When i played hl1, i thought the Tau Canon ran on the two big batteries on top of it, and i found it pretty funny
wow. this is absolutely information i needed :)
"And that's the Tau Cannon, I gauss!" *wheeze*
Dr coomer is proud
Missed the opportunity for the guard in the thumbnail to say “what do you mean overanal-“
one of the best thumbnails ive ever seen
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
Taking the gun off the vehicle explains "Something Secret Steers Us" aka "Nuclear Mission Jam" playing during that fight.
this video's thumbnail is so creative lol
Wow, incredibly deep researchment!
I think the thumbnail for this video is one of the best I've ever seen
This video helped me immensely with waiting until my hangover wore off
Great job, thanks for the deep dive
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
insane dude
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
I'm surprised I haven't seen this sight gag in a thumbnail before
brilliant thumbnail design
Incredible study.
thank you for doing the vortigaunt lines
I stopped understanding at around 10 minutes in but still watched the video
Fun fact: The tau cannon's sound is used in Rammstein - Moskau
I have so many memories with this gun on crossfire map, I spent half of my childhood jumping round with it
Would love these in-depth analysis for L4D/2
These are great!
if you're craving obscure/miscellaneous l4d2 facts I recommend Andre Ng's channel
The title make me feel that this video shouldn't be real but just a meme on the fact that some video are way too long for no good reason lmao
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.
My favourite soothing youtube voice.
Your voice is so relaxing!
Great video i fucking love this game so much
Maaaaaan your voice is so soothing on headphones. Like ASMR.
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 ?
Gluons are also elementary particles
I'm sure you put a lot of work into this and I did watch the whole thing, but somewhere around the 32 minute mark all of the words sorta just started to fold into each other and it became this sort of pleasant white noise. Maybe this is how ASMR operates for those it works on?
Thank you.
9:40 lmao the vortigaunt on the launch pad i've never seen that once in all my halife playthroughs he glitches the fuck out too so i dont think it's intended either.
That launchpad will push everything, including grenades and hornets.
@@golarac6433 I knew about those but I had never seen an enemy before
Thumbnail is certified gold
I just love hearing people yap about, literally anything related to Valve or Source games, and now I get 50 minutes straight of that? I feel lucky.
this video cured my insomnia
I NEED MORE
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.
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.
this video was probably the longest buildup for a gauss pun i will ever see
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")
depleted uranium is used for armor piercing rounds in the a10 warthog, it sharpens itself after piercing.
We don't know at what stage of prototyping the tau gun was, so perhaps it was functional enough that the xen expeditions were already doing more "practical" testing, explaining the tau gun we find at the top of lambda core
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