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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
According to the book Ignition, the US Bureau of Naval Weapons was trying to find a chemical supplier crazy enough to whip up a hundred pounds of dimethylmercury in the 50s, and when they failed they ended up trying straight liquid mercury as a high-density propellant in some poor patch of desert in New Jersey.
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I was going off an article I saw that no private company had actually built one.

My folly to not consider the Department of Defense during the Cold War.

(Randall Munroe of XKCD has remarked before that to answer the question people ask him in What If?, because it's usually such absurd scenarios, often the only relevant data he can find is from old DoD tests when they were throwing money at anybody that walked through the door)
 
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Mopman43 said:
(Ranald Munroe of XKCD has remarked before that to answer the question people ask him in What If?, because it's usually such absurd scenarios, often the only relevant data he can find is from old DoD tests when they were throwing money at anybody that walked through the door)
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I am strongly reminded of some of the entries in Things I Won't Work With.

FOOF is only stable at low temperatures; you'll never get close to RT with the stuff without it tearing itself to pieces. I've seen one reference to storing it as a solid at 90 Kelvin for later use, but that paper, a 1962 effort from A. G. Streng of Temple University, is deeply alarming in several ways. Not only did Streng prepare multiple batches of dioxygen difluoride and keep it around, he was apparently charged with finding out what it did to things. All sorts of things. One damn thing after another, actually:

"Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred."

And he's just getting warmed up, if that's the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that's -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng's reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him.
 
Boney said:
According to the book Ignition, the US Bureau of Naval Weapons was trying to find a chemical supplier crazy enough to whip up a hundred pounds of dimethylmercury in the 50s, and when they failed they ended up trying straight liquid mercury as a high-density propellant in some poor patch of desert in New Jersey.
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Well, I was going to bring up the Ignition! excerpt, but apparently it's such a good story people have already heard of it! So I'll just add one clarification: elemental mercury is bad for you. Dimethylmercury, however, is an organic molecule very easily taken up and processed by the body, and as such is not just bad for you but incredibly, lethally, toxic. Karen Wetterhahn, a chemist at Dartmouth, died from an exposure consisting of a few drops on the outside of a latex glove.
 
In the Skaven's defence the amount of broken bullshit you can make with the dwarven runes or enchantment is equally vast.

Another WHF fiction called "ISOT in Grimdark" had a lot of magitech based on the above. In story the rune of fire keeps metal hot regardless of environments, so Germany (the ISOTed people) uses them to make steam in power plants, with a tungsten block being used to power the thermal rocket in their spacecraft.
 
The Lone badger said:
We co-authored a paper on the Ratling Gun, which is powered via the rapid-decomposition of warpstone-infused ammunition.
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True but I was thinking less about similar things being described and more about similar reactions of the reader.
In other words I was wondering if any of Mathy's papers would receive the following in-universe review
If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in Collegiate Almanac, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. LM M. Weber, folks, absolutely takes the tainted exploding cake, and I have to tip my obsidian-lined lead hat to her.
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pucflek said:
Is that not what you want in a rocket?
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Depends entirely on what its for. In a military missile, yes. In an interplanetary rocket you want maximum delta-v, which means using the lightest possible fuel mass. In a surface-to-orbit rocket you need both, which we're currently accomplishing by using ginormous quantities of fuel and discarding stages as we go, meaning we want cheap clean-burning fuel.
 
Dragonofelder said:
Ice rays? What ice rays? Is Kislev getting up to shenanigans? Dammit, that's our thing!
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There's a wiki page on Experimental Weapons that I think Andres was drawing from that mentions the following:

  • Von Hugon's Terror Bell.
  • Thunder Barrel.
  • Ice Rays.
  • Alchemical bombs.
Except while the Terror Bell and Thuner Barrel are referenced on page 35 of 8th Edition Empire Army Book the Master Engineer page as oddball inventions that haven't been standardised (and they're only namedropped. Their function and practicality is unknown), the Ice Ray is a bit of a mystery to me. I'll check 6th and 7th Edition to see if they mention it, because the Wiki does not cite its sources for the Ice Ray. What a hassle.
 
Found it. Page 46 of 6th Edition Empire Army Book. The page on Master Engineers namedrops several inventions offhandedly without providing details. Ice Rays are mentioned in the same breath as "Anti-Flyer weapons, Tunnelling machines and Alchemical Bombs".
 
Dragonofelder said:
Huh, felt sure it was a Kislev thing. I suppose they have actual Ice Magic, so they don't need tech.
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Kislev don't even use Cannons until Boris' reforms. Guns were exclusively used by Streltsi, the homeland soldiers of Erengrad, and that is only because Erengrad is cosmopolitan and advanced by Kislev's standards and they trade a lot. Kislev have a bunch of disadvantages in regards to technological advancement, particularly before Boris' reign.
 
Imperial Engineers invent a lot of things. Not all of them are neccesarily practical or useful.

(Von Meinkopt's Ballistic Blizzard Blaster is just a leather slingshot and an insulated chest full of ice cubes)
 
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Speaking of Engineers, I want to talk a little about one of Boney's deep cuts. As you guys may know, I'm in London. Because I'm the inquisitive sort, I've been doing a little research (mostly wiki diving, checking maps and watching videos), and I came across a name in one of Jay Foreman's videos (great and funny youtuber. You should check him out).

The name was Joseph Bazalgette, and the reason that caught my eye is that Divided Loyalties is a hyperfixation that I've read through more than once. I remember this:
Boney said:
So gold flows to Nuln and back comes a steady stream of carefully-selected candidates. The Imperial Gunnery School wants this to go off without a hitch, so they need to ensure that they send just the right people. This is no task for a mad inventor in the tradition of Volker von Meinkopt who would reinforce everything Dwarves believe about human craftsmanship - this calls for more of a Josef Bazalgette, stolid, dependable sorts who would be content to simply create a large number of high-quality guns to proven designs without getting creative, as well as the supporting staff thereof.
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Boney referenced a "Josef Bazalgette". Except back when I first read this I was not nearly as much of a Lore nerd as I am now, so I have the experience to tell that I have never heard of Josef Bazalgette in a Warhammer source that I've read. I assumed then that Boney was the one who referenced him, except I have to check and I found out that Josef was indeed referenced in Warhammer.

Specifically Page 54 of the 2004 issue of White Dwarf #296. Either Boney had that specific issue, or more likely, he was cycling through a list of Imperial Engineers through the Wiki. The list is surprisingly robust.
 
Looking at the Library spreadsheet, I wonder. Will we be able to eventually do a kind of Imperial Magic backfill? Having do many topics half-completed means that the current use of the library action is not very efficient.
 
Tomcost said:
Looking at the Library spreadsheet, I wonder. Will we be able to eventually do a kind of Imperial Magic backfill? Having do many topics half-completed means that the current use of the library action is not very efficient.
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Colleges of Magic and Back-Fill are separate actions:
Boney said:
[ ] [LIBRARY] Colleges of Magic
Name four magical, non-divine topics to acquire all available Empire books on.
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Boney said:
[ ] [LIBRARY] Back-fill.
Instead of seeking books on specific topics, give a very broad direction and have your bookselling contacts grab everything on it that you don't already have, with special attention to existing but incomplete topics. Possible categories: Dwarven religion, human religion, geography, war and combat, social science, natural science, applied science.
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There is a hard limitation for how much magical stuff we can request from the Libraries of the Colleges. The Colleges are eight institutions loosely aligned with each other, and so the red tape involved with acquring all available books is extensive.
 
Codex said:
Colleges of Magic and Back-Fill are separate actions:


There is a hard limitation for how much magical stuff we can request from the Libraries of the Colleges. The Colleges are eight institutions loosely aligned with each other, and so the red tape involved with acquring all available books is extensive.
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I know. It is just that to complete, for example, the eight winds of magic that we are lacking, the method would take 2 turns and not be efficient at all.
 
Tomcost said:
I know. It is just that to complete, for example, the eight winds of magic that we are lacking, the method would take 2 turns and not be efficient at all.
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This probably isn't the first or last time taking an action would be inefficient in terms of cost/reward trade off. Any turn in which we're not taking advantage of WEB-MAT's extra action mechanic is "inefficient", but we still do it because sometimes efficiency needs to take a backseat to practicality.
 
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