Comparing weapons

6L6 wrote:Look up metalic hydrogen, don't know if any has been made yet but some think it could be used as rocket fuel or explosive.

I don't think Safehold is going to be capable of that level of high-pressure physics for a generation or two. Even if OWL gives them the theory, they're a long way from having the materials technology to make the tools required to make the tools needed to make the equipment to try to make Metallic Hydrogen -- and they don't have an immediate need to pursue it.

Tenshinai wrote:

6L6 wrote:An example I would use, Merlin droped a 500 lb bomb on the ship that Thirsks family was on, it seems to me that in 400 years a 1 lb bomb should do the same job. evilauthor reread my post, you will see that I was talking about bridging the gap between chemical and nuclear wepons.

That´s totally unrealistic.

Compare with how development have gone in the last 400 years.
Then consider how development on explosives is essentially slowing down because its running into physical and chemical limits.
You simply cannot get an unlimited amount of energy out of a certain amount of material.
About as far as you can manage are FAE and thermobaric, and that´s just because they "cheat" one way or another.

If in 400 years, it is possible to make even a 50lb bomb equal to a 500lb bomb today, i would be quite surprised.

Try Torpex it was an explosive used in WWII by the U.S. it was 50% more potent than an equivalent weight of TNT. Also RDX is about 2.5 x more potent than TNT.

I would rule out metallic hydrogen as we can't make it now! (pico second duration experimental masses in a lab don't count). Also in the safehold universe there is no evidence in text of advanced states of matter such as nutronius armour etc so I assume that sort of sub-molecular engineering was beyond the federation.

I also agree that there probably isn't an order of magnitude gain in chemical explosive potential between now and the time of the terran federation. Most of our current explosives date from no later than the 40's and 50's (RDX C4 etc etc) and because of the way explosions work the nature of the blast is often more important than the total force produced. E.g for serious demo work you want a "Slow" explosive that generates sustained pressure to rip stuff into tiny chunks like the AMFO filled cement truck on mythbusters. In other applications such as cutting charges and shaped charges you may want a 'Fast" explosive for greater shock value.

Silverwall wrote:I would rule out metallic hydrogen as we can't make it now! (pico second duration experimental masses in a lab don't count). Also in the safehold universe there is no evidence in text of advanced states of matter such as nutronius armour etc so I assume that sort of sub-molecular engineering was beyond the federation.

I also agree that there probably isn't an order of magnitude gain in chemical explosive potential between now and the time of the terran federation. Most of our current explosives date from no later than the 40's and 50's (RDX C4 etc etc) and because of the way explosions work the nature of the blast is often more important than the total force produced. E.g for serious demo work you want a "Slow" explosive that generates sustained pressure to rip stuff into tiny chunks like the AMFO filled cement truck on mythbusters. In other applications such as cutting charges and shaped charges you may want a 'Fast" explosive for greater shock value.

hum, there is already known chemicals that are an order of magnitude or worse more potent than current explosives (eg various azides or Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane that you can stabilize a little when mixing it with TNT!). The problem is that we don't know how to stabilize them (yet ?) so that they don't go on at the smallest shock or even light. They are also often very toxic.

Google "things I won't work with" for a blog about such fun chemistry, there is both a surprising number of them, and chemists working on those compounds between times to rebuild the lab after explosions.

alj_sf wrote:

Silverwall wrote:I would rule out metallic hydrogen as we can't make it now! (pico second duration experimental masses in a lab don't count). Also in the safehold universe there is no evidence in text of advanced states of matter such as nutronius armour etc so I assume that sort of sub-molecular engineering was beyond the federation.

I also agree that there probably isn't an order of magnitude gain in chemical explosive potential between now and the time of the terran federation. Most of our current explosives date from no later than the 40's and 50's (RDX C4 etc etc) and because of the way explosions work the nature of the blast is often more important than the total force produced. E.g for serious demo work you want a "Slow" explosive that generates sustained pressure to rip stuff into tiny chunks like the AMFO filled cement truck on mythbusters. In other applications such as cutting charges and shaped charges you may want a 'Fast" explosive for greater shock value.

hum, there is already known chemicals that are an order of magnitude or worse more potent than current explosives (eg various azides or Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane that you can stabilize a little when mixing it with TNT!). The problem is that we don't know how to stabilize them (yet ?) so that they don't go on at the smallest shock or even light. They are also often very toxic.

Google "things I won't work with" for a blog about such fun chemistry, there is both a surprising number of them, and chemists working on those compounds between times to rebuild the lab after explosions.

Exactly. TNT used to be part of those materials, "things I won't work with", till a certain man by the name of Alfred Nobel figured it out.

There are several chemicals that are better than Oxygen-Hydrogen, but any tiny shock sets them off. Many many orders of magnitude lower than fission, but still...

"21st century explosives developers had given up the quest for more power, realizing that there are inherent physical limits to rearranging the valence electrons in a substance. They concentrated instead on controllability and other useful properties.

There was no further progress until the 24 and a halfth century, when Professor Handwavium perfected the stabilization process that let bismuth be stored with its 1S orbitals empty.

Once triggered, the electrons in Handwavium-stabilized bismuth fell all the way to the base state, releasing orders of magnitude more energy than any chemical reaction."

If you allow me the sf staple of a stasis field, a pretty compact energetic explosive would be a shocked dense plasma in a stasis field.

Allow me a Slaver disintegrator that suppresses the charge on the electron, allow me to have it set the charge of every electron in the target to zero, and I'll show you a result in between a chemical and a nuclear explosion.

alj_sf wrote:

Silverwall wrote:I would rule out metallic hydrogen as we can't make it now! (pico second duration experimental masses in a lab don't count). Also in the safehold universe there is no evidence in text of advanced states of matter such as nutronius armour etc so I assume that sort of sub-molecular engineering was beyond the federation.

I also agree that there probably isn't an order of magnitude gain in chemical explosive potential between now and the time of the terran federation. Most of our current explosives date from no later than the 40's and 50's (RDX C4 etc etc) and because of the way explosions work the nature of the blast is often more important than the total force produced. E.g for serious demo work you want a "Slow" explosive that generates sustained pressure to rip stuff into tiny chunks like the AMFO filled cement truck on mythbusters. In other applications such as cutting charges and shaped charges you may want a 'Fast" explosive for greater shock value.

hum, there is already known chemicals that are an order of magnitude or worse more potent than current explosives (eg various azides or Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane that you can stabilize a little when mixing it with TNT!). The problem is that we don't know how to stabilize them (yet ?) so that they don't go on at the smallest shock or even light. They are also often very toxic.

Google "things I won't work with" for a blog about such fun chemistry, there is both a surprising number of them, and chemists working on those compounds between times to rebuild the lab after explosions.

I did google Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane and it is ~20% more powerful than HMX (RDX)which has been about since WW2 so my comment stands, while more powerful it is not the order of magnitude more powerful suggested at the start of this subthread, it would need to be 1000% more powerful to be an order of magnitude better and there is no evidence of this being possible using conventional chemistry. To get better than this you start getting into exotic states of matter such as high energy activated orbitals mentioned above and there is no text evidence that the Terran Federation had technology at this level.

Silverwall wrote:
I did google Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane and it is ~20% more powerful than HMX (RDX)which has been about since WW2 so my comment stands, while more powerful it is not the order of magnitude more powerful suggested at the start of this subthread, it would need to be 1000% more powerful to be an order of magnitude better and there is no evidence of this being possible using conventional chemistry. To get better than this you start getting into exotic states of matter such as high energy activated orbitals mentioned above and there is no text evidence that the Terran Federation had technology at this level.

Humm.... with a name that impressive it should be a lot more than 20% more powerfull...

Don

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Silverwall wrote:

alj_sf wrote:
hum, there is already known chemicals that are an order of magnitude or worse more potent than current explosives (eg various azides or Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane that you can stabilize a little when mixing it with TNT!). The problem is that we don't know how to stabilize them (yet ?) so that they don't go on at the smallest shock or even light. They are also often very toxic.

Google "things I won't work with" for a blog about such fun chemistry, there is both a surprising number of them, and chemists working on those compounds between times to rebuild the lab after explosions.

I did google Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane and it is ~20% more powerful than HMX (RDX)which has been about since WW2 so my comment stands, while more powerful it is not the order of magnitude more powerful suggested at the start of this subthread, it would need to be 1000% more powerful to be an order of magnitude better and there is no evidence of this being possible using conventional chemistry. To get better than this you start getting into exotic states of matter such as high energy activated orbitals mentioned above and there is no text evidence that the Terran Federation had technology at this level.

What is 20% more energetic than HMX is the (relatively) stabilized version with TNT called CL-20, and it is when considering it as propellant. There is less than 50% of Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane in CL-20. But I cited it because it is a compound almost stable, the metal azides or the peroxydes of peroxides and many others are more potent besides the little problem of stabilizing them.

And yes, an order of magnitude is a tall order for a safe compound, but the actual most potent stable explosives, HMX and octonitrocubane (sp?), are not very packed structures and so there is room for denser explosives.

If I remember right, non-explosive fuel chemicals run about an order of magnitude better in energy density than high explosives.