That's me. Giant buzzkill. I get paid for it and everything. ;-P
There's nothing wrong with the "not really nuclear gun + TDE = BOOM" theory. It's entirely possible that firing the gun during the transfer damaged something in the TDE and resulted in the explosion. Like I said: lot of energy = big chance of going boom.
But given that the Resistance is frequently trying to prevent future tech from contaminating the timeline and accelerating Skynet (or at least the Connors are... it occurs to me that we don't know how the Resistance feels about it) and that a time machine is about as dangerous as technology can get, it wouldn't surprise me if they had a self-destruct built into it.
Re: Bank Vault TDE
There's nothing wrong with the "not really nuclear gun + TDE = BOOM" theory. It's entirely possible that firing the gun during the transfer damaged something in the TDE and resulted in the explosion. Like I said: lot of energy = big chance of going boom.
But given that the Resistance is frequently trying to prevent future tech from contaminating the timeline and accelerating Skynet (or at least the Connors are... it occurs to me that we don't know how the Resistance feels about it) and that a time machine is about as dangerous as technology can get, it wouldn't surprise me if they had a self-destruct built into it.