Introducing the Hunter process.

Why bother with titanium? just do some handwaveium and Battle Steel!
breast plates would be back in fashion.



laz

AirTech wrote:
And given the branching into manufacturing of smokeless powders ammonia production and hence nitric acid is going to become critical to the war effort. Ammonia production is one of the reasons Germany felt strong enough to start the first world war thanks to the work of Fritz Haber removing the Chilean guano bottle neck controlled by the English.
The mechanical equipment is almost in place and a chemist with inner circle access has been cleared so this should be a small step.

I would say some of the equipment is in place or nearly in place. The problem would be to have a pressure vessel to handle the required pressure of the Haber process. The temperature is not a problem, the other would be for them to realise you require Iron with Potassium Nitrate as the catalyst to speed the reaction along. Otherwise no Iron/KNO3 then it takes a while to produce anything worthwhile. Admittedly EoC has the advantage of a certain entity called OWL to point this out

BarryKirk wrote:

dan92677 wrote:I'm still waiting for the thread to return to titanium, or something similar...

I know I know this thread got wildly off topic very quickly, but the upside was it had one of, IMHO, best RFC posts of all times.

I whole-heartedly agree BarryKirk plus some of DW's other responses were very insightful as well.

Thrandir wrote:
I would say some of the equipment is in place or nearly in place. The problem would be to have a pressure vessel to handle the required pressure of the Haber process. The temperature is not a problem, the other would be for them to realise you require Iron with Potassium Nitrate as the catalyst to speed the reaction along. Otherwise no Iron/KNO3 then it takes a while to produce anything worthwhile. Admittedly EoC has the advantage of a certain entity called OWL to point this out



I know I know this thread got wildly off topic very quickly, but the upside was it had one of, IMHO, best RFC posts of all times.

I whole-heartedly agree BarryKirk plus some of DW's other responses were very insightful as well.[/quote]

Of course you could do what Haber suggested and use uranium catalyst as an alternative to iron to lower the pressure and temperature requirements (a cannon barrel makes a perfectly serviceable ammonia production reactor - I worked on one in the mid 80's that was still in service, rifle barrels work for ammonia piping in small reactors too). Ammonia gives you cheap nitric acid leading to ammonium nitrate and trinitrotoluene (TNT), mix them and you have Amatol - a perfectly serviceable bomb and shell filling. Guided solid fuel missiles are a small step beyond this and then you are back in space in a few years...