Brokkr
Everything except the losing interest part is what people love about factory games. So while they have your interest, realize that you are absolutely playing them “correctly”. But if you don’t like iterating your designs (not everyone does, and that’s OK), then these are probably not the right genre for you.
Have you seen the Tom Scott video?
If it works for hamsters may be a properly built one could work for people, but there’s absolutely no ethical way to test that.
Unfortunately, this is one of those fun ideas that simply won’t ever be possible. Even if we start with the easy one of just breaking chemical bonds, those bonds exist because it reduces the total energy of the system.
To “disrupt” those bonds, energy must be supplied, and to do it for even a small amount of material would require a tremendous amount of energy. Delivering that much energy over a distance just isn’t possible because atmosphere in between would also be “disrupted”. The disrupted material would also fly apart at high speeds and high temperatures. So any type of “ray” or “gun” would just turn into a bomb with a pistol grip trigger. I expect that the user experience testing would have lots of very negative reviews.
Do you mean geologic, not geographic?
How does that work though? Sedimentary rocks formed in the last 100 years must be way deeper than any of the soil that could be affected by the atmosphere?
Or am I overthinking this and you’re saying that there’s an indicator in recent soil deposits that correlates to radioactive testing.