The Captain was at the waterfall at Blighton’s Cliff for his morning shower.
“Reliz said you wanted to see me,” Physics told him.
“Yes, I have a chemistry project to discuss with you. Two companies, one in Germany and one in Moldavia, have come out with new explosives for cannon ammo and they want to sell them to us at attractive pricing. We would get good pricing because no one is buying either ammo.”
“What are the chemicals?”
“Sorry Physics, but I won’t be telling that to anyone. We’re gonna call what comes from Germany, A, and what comes from Moldavia, B.”
“Gotcha.”
“I bought samples of both and testing them. I was hoping if we mixed them we could make something that would explode when wet. It didn’t. What is aggravating further is, if the mixture is dry it considerably more powerful.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ten pounds of a mixture makes a bigger bang than ten pounds of either ammo by itself. This would be great. I worry that an accident on the ship could lead to casualties. Ammo stored dry has an instability that I can’t accept. Can you think of any third variable tricks to work around the dilemma?”
“Not at moment but give me some time.”
---
“How is it coming?” Nate asked Physics a few hours later.
“I still have no idea what we can do,” Physics replied.
“Don’t worry,” Nate said assuredly. “Rock doesn’t get mad when we don’t have an answer, he just wants us to be solidly sure that there is no answer.”
“Thanks. I keep banging my head up against the slogan that you can never prove a negative.”
Nate laughed. “We’ve learned to be clever. Sometimes the answer is in the question.”
Physics stared at the space in front of him. “Oh my Padres!” he said.
“What?”
“The answer is within wet ammo. We take Caulderon Number Three, an ammo that explodes wet and we encase a mixture of A and B. We call Caulderon Number Three C, for sake of simplicity. So we have a shell of C surrounding an optimum mixture of A and B. When a spherical shell explodes it releases pressure both outward and inward. When C explodes it releases heat and pressure. The heat separates the hydrating water from A and B making A and B dry and the pressure inward will work with the high temperature to make the A and B explode.”
“So you know this?”
“No, I don’t. We will need to field test it. For every test we need to set up blocks around the ammo in a pattern and we use the same pattern every time. After the explosion we count the number of blocks that have been knocked over. That gives us a number. The bigger the number the bigger the explosion. Since we have a number from a measurement we run 15 tests for each experiment so we can do statistical analysis and get a 95% confidence interval.
---
We ran the tests and found the explosion of C was sufficient explode the AB mixture. We modified the size of the C shell making it smaller, making sure it would still ignite the AB mixture.
“We will make two sizes of shells,” Rock told us. The smaller ones will be used first so we can engage the enemy at a further distance. We may be able to take out small fleets before they ever get close enough to us to fire a shot. That is a game changer.”
“Physics, I have an idea,” Nate said.
“Yes?”
“When wet the D ammo is the safest ammo we have. If it can make the AB mixture explode then cannon balls with D, then we would have a better ammo."
---
The tests showed D to be as reliable as C.
“We got our game,” Rock said.
“Yeah,” Reliz added. “The Caribbean already fears the Rock. Now they can fear the fury of D.”
