Quote:
Originally Posted by Gedrin
Thing is, I don't need to heat the bomb all the way to critical via magic. I can heat it to volatile but stable via plain old fire. The only reason Heat is needed (or it's new brother), is to push it over the edge after launch. There's probably a lot of "margin of safety" research in the R&D effort.
I'll be sure to check out the steam cannon. However, I want to avoid "teams of mages". They're beyond the resources of this idea. A large coal fire pit to pre-heat bombs is a better deal.
The shrapnel point is a good one, but I'm imagining projectiles of significant size, 300-400 pounds at the big end. RL trebuchet's could manage that without the fantastic materials available IMC. However, the point about shrapnel is well taken. I think this could be overcome by properly shaping the sphere to fragment. That would be a later innovation to the same weapon, but likely a significant one.
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Is your materials science/metalurgy, dimensional tolerancing, temperature measurement and magical control of heat flux advanced enough that your operators can reliably predict when the casing will fail? If not it seems like you are asking them to risk messy death or ineffectiveness with every launch.
If all of those problems are solved then pre-grooving for shrapnel is trivial.