Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
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).
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Not having Spaceships with me, how would the results from these methods look for ammunition in the 4 oz. range, the 8 oz. range and the 1-lb range? Or 2-3 lbs.?
I was thinking that a sling which could use 1-lb rocks could launch fired clay ovoids or spheres containing smokepowder, which would weigh around 0.33-0.5 lbs., depending on how much was fired clay and how much was packed smokepowder. A similar sized cast-iron shell with a smokepowder charge would weight 1.5 to 2 lbs.
I just need to know how much of the projectile needs to be casing and how much can be explosive filler. That allows me to calculate cr ex and fragmentation damage, using the explosives rules in
Campaigns and comparing to shells and grenades in
High-Tech for reasonable fragmentation.
Using incendiaries, the 1-lb rock size (about a fist) would yield a ca 4 oz. fired clay projectile, with around an ounce of that being incendiary oil. That's not much, really. Good on a direct hit, of course, but without magic, fuzing for that is pretty much a matter of luck.
For incendiaries to work, we'd need an oversized sling pouch launching oversized clay spheres. And that would play havoc with range. But it might get 30-40m or so, with decent accuracy for good slingers, which is at least better than hand hurled incendiaries.