I concur with your reasoning that its picric acid.
By the time the temple is able to copy it, the war will be over, the EoC will have moved on to more powerful and stable compounds and the CoGA stick-in-the-mud's will have to deal with the instability issues.
L
Graydon wrote:jmseeley wrote:*quote="Graydon"*My first thought was that it was more likely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picric_acid than TNT; [...]
Since Dr. Lywys knows all this, I think it probably is TNT.
I lean toward picric acid. The numbers are right, and there's textev to support it. From LAMA p. 117, Dr. Lywys after joining the Inner Circle:By the time he'd returned her to Tellesberg, she and Owl had worked out exactly what they needed to do to reproduce Poudre B, the original smokeless powder of Old Earth, and also the more stable cordite which had followed it.
Picric acid was also a possibility, especially as a high-explosive shell filling, given the enormous quantities of coal tar being produced by Howsmyn's coking ovens, but it's tendencies towards long-term instability made Lywys-and the rest of the circle-less than eager to charge full speed in that direction. Producing it would be relatively straightforward, however, and could probably be accomplished on a useful scale more rapidly that Poudre B or cordite.
Despite it's shortcomings, the inner circle might have decided to use it in a limited way because of it's power and near-term availability. It could be an interim solution until they can develop enough of a chemical industry to provide feedstock for TNT. It's a case of good-enough available right now vs. having to wait another year or so for perfect.
That's certainly a strong argument for going with an initial run of picric acid. And the initial reports from Siddarmark would have tended to encourage going with least-time-to-produce.
Plus, of course, you know -- if you're doing munitions planning for the Empire of Charis -- that you're going to be swapping all the cocoa-powder quick-firing gun breeches in the near future, to handle the change in charge sizes that comes with cordite. So you may not have done a full production run of those, either. DELTHAK's present armament might be in the character of a live fire test rather than the initial deployment of something intended for general issue, and if that's true you could certainly plan on expending all your picric acid-filled shells before there's much risk of instability.[/quote]