Can a secondary explosion cause a tertiary explosion? If yes, small magazine may be more dangerous, as having one take a hit means it'll get destroyed, and likely destroy more magazine, that can destroy even more magazines...
As far as I know, yes it can create a tertiary explosion. Even so, on average there will be no difference (assuming they're both HTK1 and you've got the same capacity in both cases) in the damage done by tertiaries in the same set of magazines. It all comes back to the fact that both the large and small magazines are HTK1. Let's say we're comparing 10 size-1 magazines to 1 size-10 (both HTK1), and let's say the secondary explosion strengths are 10pts and 100pts respectively. If a small magazine is hit and explodes, then it's the same thing as the ship taking a new strength 10 hit from a bad guy weapon in a spot with no armor (i.e. all interior). The ship still has 9 magazines left - even if all of them are hit and explode (a VERY low probably - if explosion probability is 0.1, then you've only got a 10^-9 chance of all 9 blowing up) you'll only generate an additional 90 points of secondary damage, for a total of 100 points of secondary damage. If a size-10 magazine is hit and explodes, you take that 100 points of damage immediately, and there aren't any extra magazines to soak up hits with their HTK. Note that for an explosion chance of 0.1, one of the size-1's exploding will do on average 1 point of damage (10pts * 0.1 chance), while the size-10 does 10 points of damage. I just realized this is interesting - since both are 1HTK, the size-1 is effectively 0HTK on average (it absorbs 1 hit, but on average will blow up doing a hit of secondary damage) and the size-9 is
negative 9HTK (it absorbs one hit generates 10 in secondaries). It just occurred to me that magazine clusters with negative effective HTK are like atomic bombs - they're susceptible to a chain reaction that blows all the magazines up.
John
