gcomeau wrote:runsforcelery wrote:Guys ---
I'm very sorry for how late this one is coming in. Sharon has been really, really sick for the last couple of weeks with a respiratory problem that just isn't going away, and while she's been under the weather, I've had to pick up and carry a lot of other balls. There just haven't been enough hours in a day to keep up with everything, I'm afraid. Anyway, this one's a bit longer as a sort of consolation prize.
As explanations for keeping us addicts waiting goes I'm pretty sure everyone here will be agreed that that's more than justified your absence... hope things are improving._________________________________________
And as a consolation prize for the M96 rifles he hadn’t received, Ehdwyrd Howsmyn had sent along eight hundred additional six-inch shells, with even more in the supply chain behind them . . . and just under a hundred tons of Sahndrah Lywys’ newest brainchild. On a pound-for-pound basis, Lywysite was roughly two and a half times as powerful as black powder, because the shock wave of its detonation propagated at over twenty-three thousand feet per second while black powder’s detonation velocity was less than two thousand. That gave Lewysite a much greater shattering effect, and since it weighed twice as much per cubic inch, the same weight charge could be packed into half the volume. And that meant it could be formed into neat sticks, ten inches long and one and a quarter inches in diameter, each of which weighed just under twenty ounces . . . and packed the effectiveness of over three pounds of black powder into barely fifteen percent of the black powder’s volume.
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Hmmm... Nitroglycerin? No visual description of the substance itself but the packing into sticks suggests someone just re-invented some variant of dynamite?
C-4 is closer to the numbers...
