Lets have a blast

[head-swell] I know I am......[cheesy grin...]


Heck, why are we still waiting?...
LETS BLOW SOMETHING UP ALREADY......

I think they used a dynamite analog for the first test, and then detcord for the follow ups. I don't recall what they used for the revisit.

In the versions I've read of that tale, the officer in question stripped off in order to swim and he kept his hat so that the British would recognise him as an officer and treat him accordingly. One version even has him returning to the ship to get the hat after leaving without it. In all of the versions, he left the ship once the fire was out of control but before the explosions happened.

From French archaeological dives on the ship, we know that there were two explosions, the first in the forward magazine and the second in the main magazine. This second one was sufficiently powerful to blow the stern off the ship - so anyone still on board at that point was very unlikely to survive.

Magazines....
I got a time team idea here, and it sort of does and doesnt make "sense".
In the plans that they have of a fort, from about that time when Lizzy was avin a spot of bover with the neighbours, that had the magazine outside the walls.....
They dug tunnels under the walls from the inside, and the plan was to store the explosives underground outside the main walls?....

So how explosive is explosive.
And what kind of a bang would that have made if a room, say 10ft cube, was stocked up with gunpowder......

Dragon want HUGE underground bOOm here.

They got maybe a desert they could do that in?....


To clarify Doesn't make sense... it was not that far from the walls, in fact partly under one corner of the fort...
In my estimation, if it HAD goon bang, it would have taken that wall down.

Sounds like one of the Artillery forts build along the southern coast of England like Deal or Walmer Castle, that were not designed to hold out during a siege, but to provide a gun platform against incoming enemy ships, so a magazine under a wall might not be considered the same danger as in a earlier castle.

I am not sure that incoming enemy fire was a problem at the time the design of the forts where conceived, starting in Henry VIIIs time, cannon where firing solid shot against the fort walls which may not have been considered to be able to penetrate deep enough in the ground to be a danger. In many cases the guns we see now in such places are old Georgian or Victorian guns, which are larger than those ships equivalent to The Mary Rose was carrying.

Accidents or a stray spark, the same considerations would have to be made for any design of powder store, above or below ground, dampened curtains etc similar practises to those on board ships that Cyber will Know more about.

In Medieval castles the danger would have been considered undermining in a siege, if that had happened into such an underground store then real trouble would occur.

I'm not up on land-based magazine stores, but from what little I do recall they had 'fearnought' screens; basically a leather curtain over the entrance. On ships these screens were wetted before being into action, but I'd guess this might not have been done on land as the risk of fire was probably lower.

As far as hitting a magazine store goes, if you were dealing with ships then the risk of an underground magazine being hit was effectively zero. Cannon fire from ships would hit the ground at such a shallow angle it would skip off without doing more than putting a shallow dent in the topsoil. The only weapons capable of hitting the ground at anything close to 90 degrees would be mortars and rockets, neither of which was known for accuracy and had enough problems hitting cities let alone individual buildings. They also would have lacked the ability to penetrate any significant distance into the ground.

Off the top of my head the real risk to land magazines was fire, not shot.

What about playing with explosives...as in playing music?

Different explosives produce slightly different sounds when detonated, especially since you could expand this to include rockets, fireworks and firearms. So could you use this to play a recognisable tune using explosives alone?

I believe that ship-mounted mortars were first used by the French around the end of the 17th century. I also think that the use of rockets in European warfare only happened when the British started using Congreve's designs (in the late 18th Century), following their encounters with rockets on the battlefields in India.