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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3372631" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ahhhh.. yeah.  That's the problem you have when you play with highly knowledgable people.  They know alot of stuff.Well, even granting that what you have experience with is guncotton (3 times as powerful as black powder), and even granting that what's in a Claymore is (correct me if I'm wrong here) RDX which is a whole different ball game when it comes to gas velocity, yeah, a claymore like device could be a potential problem.  But still, for the sake of argument, I'm not entirely convinced you could build one with black powder, at least one that works like a claymore, because to achieve the force of detonation you'd need to get it to work you'd have to bind the powder pretty tightly, and that would destroy the physics that make a claymore work in the first place.  So, a pipe bomb, sure, you can do that with black powder, but I'm not convinced of a claymore.  And even if I was, I'm not convinced of its ability to penetrate plate outside of 30 meters or so.Ditto with shaped charges.  Again, to get a shaped charge to work, you need an explosion that happens almost simultanously throughout the charge.  That doesn't happen with black powder.  The sodium nitrate and desiel fuel with a bit of powdered nails and aluminum charges that you are used to improvising as breaching devices have a rate of burn thats like nine times what you get with black powder (you can grind black powder really fine to get the grains to pack to partly offset that, but that's a good way to blow yourself up).  So to get your shaped charge to work, you'd have to build a massive sturdy chest shaped like the charge you wanted to create, and pack it tightly with fine grained powder, then transport it without it getting rained on and so forth.  And the thing is, I think I could handle that sort of thing.  It's no worse than the typical plan of cammando team of flying invisible PC's that storm the barbican and open the gates for the army advancing undercover of obscuring mist.And I'm inclined to think your animal intestine idea doesn't work at all.  You get an explosion with all the force of a firecracker, because animal intestine doesn't bind black powder tightly enough to keep it from blowing apart and just burning.  And the weight required - look it up in the manual - would prohibit the breaching effect I think you are going for. Yeah, I know the feeling.  I did play with a guy who was demolition and airborne trained, but fortunately the whole explosive thing never came up.</blockquote>

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