WeberFan wrote:I KNEW I'd find it if I kept re-reading!
LAMA, October 896, Chapter IV: Sarkyn, Tairohn Hills, and Archbishop's Palace, City of St. Vyrdyn, Princeton of Sarkyn. "A shiver ran through the carefully stowed cargo. The powder was Saladin casks, stacked on their sides and carefully chocked to prevent them from shifting, with each layer of casks cushioned from the ones above and below by a layer of woven straw. It was no one's fault, really, that one. cask in the bottommost tier had a cracked barrel stave. It had been damaged in loading, but the crack was so small no one had noticed it at the time... just as no one knew about the dusting of gunpowder which had sifted through the crack to gather between the damaged cask and its neighbor over the course of the thirty-five-hundred-mile journey from Lake PEI." (emphasis mine).
So back to the original point I was making in the thread... Yes, ship magazines are kept clean. Makes sense. But given the darkness of the ship magazines and their close quarters with only the "powder monkeys" entering them regularly; and given the inherent movement of the ships as they sail, I think it would be "logical" to assume that powder would "sift through cracks" in barrels or sift through the weaving of bags. Other textev suggested to me that this was pretty common and was one of the inherent hazards of the original mealed powder.
An incendiary remote detonating this "spillage" in even a few ships would devastate the ship.
Yes, I know Merlin might not countenance wholesale destruction of a fleet in this manner, but 5-10 percent of a fleet? Perhaps with the senior commanders on board?
To see David Weber's answer to this question, see the FAQ section of this website: http://www.davidweber.net/faqs/index/series:6, "Why doesn't Merlin use SNARCs to sabotage the Church's war efforts?"