Explosives after a collapse

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Explosives after a collapse Mad Scientist 01/04/16 (Mon) 06:07:24 No.66

Lets say you need to lay low for a bit in the countryside, how would one make explosives with almost no precursor chemicals or much access to equipment?

I know nitrogen is the mother for most explosives but how far can one get with nitre beds and moving with that how complex can you get with a layperson's experience with chemistry? Every other method seems to either requires chemicals uses resources that would be hard to come by or too energy intensive.

Reading LeConte's guide for average groups of farmers to create relatively high yielding nitre beds is about what I want to go for in terms of accessibility.

Mainly what I'm interested in is the production of smokeless powders and lead styphnate for small arms.

Mad Scientist 01/08/16 (Fri) 07:18:51 No.67

In my opinion, the best bet would be to have something like a solar panel or a water mill feeding into a system for nitrogen fixation.

If you can get enough energy to convert nitrogen to plasma (something like 900~ joules?) than you can "fixate" the nitrogen in the air into NO2. If you can bubble this into water, it will slowly generate nitric acid.

It's a somewhat long process, but it's probably one of the best overall processes for making nitrates that you can do on the small to medium scale.

I've investigated it quite a bit and plenty of hobbyists have done it, but it does take specialty equipment.

If you want to really do something low tech, then I think you're on the right track with the farm style nitre beds. I don't know much about making nitrates or explosives out of the very very common chemicals, but nitrogen fixation was the standard method of industrial production for quite some time. It is very energy intensive, but can also be very cheap as well once setup properly.

Although, this reminds me…..

If you could get ahold of a whipped cream maker with the commercial whipped cream canisters, or even the simple grocery store whipped cream spray cans, you could maybe make a panclastite by intentionally condensing the N2O that they use in that sort of thing.

If you can get it liquid it would make very potent explosives if mixed with fine saw dust or paper, but they would be very sensitive.

Lead styphnate seems as though it would be very very hard to make without quite a solid industrial base or a way to source resorcinol.

You might be better off trying out something more like lead picrate or lead azide.

Mad Scientist 02/22/16 (Mon) 07:52:27 No.69

Well, I do wonder if you'll actually check back in here, but I found something that might be a bit interesting to you for your purposes.

I considered this for a while, but essentially, there do exist bacteria that are known for helping plants grow by fixating atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia or other substances.

http://www.reforest.com/#!am-120-mycorrhizal-inolculum/c1qcw

I do believe this fungus is known for doing so, but it's hard to find specifics and also honestly hard to determine how relevant this technology is to your interests.

But, if you can find a good sample of the stuff, you MIGHT be able to basically get quite literally a small explosives farm going, where you grow fungus that produces ammonia or other forms of fixed nitrogen that you can use as a leaping off point for making explosives.