Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
Clay is fine for incendiary grenades, but I'm concerned about whether it can contain the burning of the smokepowder well enough to produce an actual concussive explosion. Since black powder (and thus REF 0.5 smokepowder, which is a magical version of the same thing) is a deflagrating explosive, it requires confinement for a worthwhile explosion to happen. Hence, if you use clay, you'll need much more material than if you used cast iron.
|
Offhand, ISTR a rule in HT about contained explosives, wherein if enough explosive damage reached the furthest wall of a room and didn't destroy any windows/walls/etc, all damage within the area was doubled. It might be appropriate to say that, for deflagrating explosives, a container that can withstand the non-contained explosion is necessary for a proper explosion to occur. We'll take it another step and say a deflagrating explosive that
fails to explode is treated as having, say, 1/2 normal REF, so really you only need a container that can withstand that. So, figure out how much iron you need for sufficient DR to contain an (in this case) REF 0.25 explosion, then figure out the same for clay. This should be more than sufficient to have a proper explosion (you can likely scale it down further, but I have no idea how far this could go...).
EDIT: Come to think of it, to get the DR values you could probably use the rules from Spaceships. Iron (if it isn't already in one of the books) would be one step down from Steel, Clay would probably be a step (maybe 2) down from Stone. That'll give you the necessary mass, then you just use the densities of iron and clay to figure out volume.
Another thought is that, for fragmentation, you could fill the explosives with sharp steel shards. This would really only be necessary for clay-contained explosives, and probably only truly useful with rather
large explosives (like landmines and the like).