REF of Tannerite and other east to mix binary explosive?

[Dalillama]

Like I said, Gelignite's gonna be your friend here. Your company can get the precursors without any hassle, so it's a lot easier than making it at home would be, and a quick check gives an REF of 1.6, which is well better than Tannerite.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Like I said, Gelignite's gonna be your friend here. Your company can get the precursors without any hassle, so it's a lot easier than making it at home would be, and a quick check gives an REF of 1.6, which is well better than Tannerite.

As Gandalf would say: "Is it secret? Is it safe?"

That is, how safe and easy would home-made Gelignite be to work with using Explosives (Demolitions)?

How controlled are the precursors? How traceable?

And, for that matter, what is the legality of home-made Gelignite?

If you make to to use on your own land, for fun, for example?

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Icelander

As Gandalf would say: "Is it secret? Is it safe?"

That is, how safe and easy would home-made Gelignite be to work with using Explosives (Demolitions)?

How controlled are the precursors? How traceable?

And, for that matter, what is the legality of home-made Gelignite?

If you make to to use on your own land, for fun, for example?

The precursors are nitric acid, glycerine, some sort of cellulose, and saltpeter or potassium sulfate. The first and last are somewhat controlled, but not to the point where the company would have to account for the whereabouts of it all. Basically, buying large amounts of it will make someone thing maybe you're making explosives, but if you're known and licensed to be making explosives you can buy pretty much all you want. It's not legal to make or own any kind of plastic explosive without taggants in the States, so if anyone actually found and examined it you'd be in a bit of trouble. Someone who knows their way around explosives and has a proper setup could make it safely, or as safely as you're going to get making explosives.

[Anthony]

The other thing to consider is who exactly is investigating. If there's someone actually investigating stuff being blown up, they're going to quite naturally be investigating all the people who have access to explosives (probably expecting theft), but teams investigating places where monsters have been blown up are also rather likely to find evidence of monsters, which (a) might make the monster disinclined to call in the authorities, and (b) might make the authorities decide to turn a blind eye to the issue.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The other thing to consider is who exactly is investigating. If there's someone actually investigating stuff being blown up, they're going to quite naturally be investigating all the people who have access to explosives (probably expecting theft), but teams investigating places where monsters have been blown up are also rather likely to find evidence of monsters, which (a) might make the monster disinclined to call in the authorities, and (b) might make the authorities decide to turn a blind eye to the issue.

Authorities in the US (rarely, hopefully, because no one wants to use explosives where there are well-funded law enforcement agencies) and, more likely, authorities in various Caribbean locations.

Using taggants, even a small, under-funded police force on an island of under 100,000 people can eventually discover where an explosive came from. Absent that, how is even the Belize Police Force, in a Caribbean nation of more than three times that population, going to investigate every company in the world with access to industrial explosives after a series of explosions in the jungle?

Realistically, does a detective from Belize come and check the inventory of every oil company in the Houston area? Not likely, not without taggants to use as the basis for a joint investigation with US law enforcement.

As for monsters, any remains tend to disappear or become either human or animal with the dawn. If not, they rarely last outside the higher Mana area they were in and by the time any samples are in a laboratory, they are contaminated or something mundane. Any forensic evidence left by the hunters, however (as long as it is not magical), will be there for analysis.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

The precursors are nitric acid, glycerine, some sort of cellulose, and saltpeter or potassium sulfate. The first and last are somewhat controlled, but not to the point where the company would have to account for the whereabouts of it all. Basically, buying large amounts of it will make someone thing maybe you're making explosives, but if you're known and licensed to be making explosives you can buy pretty much all you want. It's not legal to make or own any kind of plastic explosive without taggants in the States, so if anyone actually found and examined it you'd be in a bit of trouble. Someone who knows their way around explosives and has a proper setup could make it safely, or as safely as you're going to get making explosives.

Part of making gelignite is making nitroglycerine. It's not trivial to make safely.

I would settle for skimming dynamite, gelignite, or other blasting explosives from a legitimate mining/quarrying business. A few sticks here and there won't go missing, and if it's consistent there won't even be a sudden spike in consumption to arouse anyone's suspicions.

If you must make you own, TNT is no harder to make than nitro, and while it's not quite as powerful, it's a hell of a lot safer to store, transport, and use. You still have to source detonators, etc., though. I suppose that's one thing you don't need with nitro, as it needs very little excuse to detonate.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What's the next level up from that? Something you can buy or make without necessarily having it traced back to you? Something that might not be the most powerful explosive available at late TL8, but is considerably better than black powder and can actually work as a breaching charge or as the blasting agent in a satchel charge with silver shrapnel?

Don't try making your own nitroglycerine. Making your own TNT and mixing it with the oxidiser from Tannerite gets you Amatol. Factory-made Amatol is REF 1.2 if the proportions are right. This will be a little worse, maybe 1.1, because your TNT won't be so pure.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Rupert

I would settle for skimming dynamite, gelignite, or other blasting explosives from a legitimate mining/quarrying business. A few sticks here and there won't go missing, and if it's consistent there won't even be a sudden spike in consumption to arouse anyone's suspicions.

What's the cut-off for taggants? How common and non-threatening does an explosive need to be to be sold without them?

That's really the limiting factor with using commercially bough explosives.

For example, is REF 0.8 Tovex sold with taggants?

That's the explosive that pretty much everyone uses in offshore oil drilling and our Monster Hunters can have vast amounts diverted for their uses, as long as doing so would not identify the company that bought it because of tracing taggants.

According to Daillama, any kind of plastic explosive is illegal to buy, sell or possess in the United States without taggants. What kind of blasting explosives used in mining, oil exploration or other common commercial uses do not fall under that, presumably because no one worries enough about them?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

For example, is REF 0.8 Tovex sold with taggants?

It appears not: searching the manufacturer's website (biafo.com) for "tag", "tagging" and "taggant" gets no hits.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Anders

As someone who loved organic chemistry, that sounds reasonable. You need a lot carefully controlled temperature or things will explode and if you do things too quickly... well, again with the explosions.

As someone who was in fact working on a chemistry degree before moving to physics, and who liked explosives and even tried to cook them: Yes. Cooking your own is unwise on far too many levels.

Setting aside explosion risk (and I have a friend who's missing a few fingers thanks to his youthful experiments), there are fumes and runoff. You're very likely to be detected because of these things even if you hide your reagent purchases and totally circumvent taggants by cooking at home. Or you can buy high-efficiency lab solutions to hide the signs of production, which puts you on the same watch lists as people buying vast quantities of nitrogen compounds.

Safe manufacture is slow. Movies love to gloss over how slow safely producing significant quantities of high-quality illegal substances – drugs, explosives, nerve gas, whatever – is. And for explosives, you want "high quality," as any significant impurities will at best make demolitions calculations unreliable and at worst reduce stability and blow you up.

And of course you've just doubled the needed skill set from "can work with explosives" to "chemistry" and "can work with explosives." That means twice as many people or one person who costs more to hire, and either way that gives investigators a far narrower field of suspects to pursue.

Originally Posted by Icelander

However, if you do that every time you need to blow something up, you're drawing a lot of attention to all your cover companies.

Over the years, these connections will mount up. Hence, ideally, as little actually illegal activity as possible.

That is why you do it once and think big. Don't arrange for your associates to "steal" a few kilos or tens of kilos at a time, as needed; arrange for them to make off with a few tonnes, which ought to be enough for quite a lot of demolition, and warehouse it somewhere uninteresting. Yes, there will be aggressive investigations, but they aren't magically more likely to succeed because more went missing; people might look harder for an important quantity, but they'll have just one "transaction" to trace, not dozens that establish a pattern.

Think of Walter White and friends stealing a tanker train worth of methylamine rather than trying to buy a few hundred millilitres at a time from supply houses. (Despite being about drugs, Breaking Bad is actually full of interesting possibilities for explosives thieves, users, and makers: specialized skill sets, vastly complicated secret labs, an obsession with purity, huge one-off thefts, support of a transnational cover conglomerate, transactions via burners and dead drops, etc. Replace "meth" with, say "RDX," and DEA adversaries with ATF adversaries, and make the end-user skill set "Explosives" instead of "being a drug addict.")

Originally Posted by Icelander

I agree, which is why it seemed fairly odd that normal Explosives (Demolitions) skill included the ability to make plastic explosives at full skill, according to High-Tech.

I would call than an error. My own feeling is that the skills for making (Chemistry) and using (Explosives) explosives are as different as the skills for making (Bioengineering, Computer Programming, Engineer, etc.) and using (Physician, Computer Operation, Electronics Operation, etc.) any other technology. Something for me to fix in a putative future edition.