At 06:44 PM 3/27/04 -0500, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
And, remember again, you have to *enclose* a burning gas to make it explosive first place.
Bob, stick with obfuscated economics and playing with boats. Many gases are explosive in certain ratios to air. Gasoline vapor, acetylene, in a wide range of ratios to air. Others have narrower ranges. But within these ranges you don't need enclosures. Except maybe for shrapnel. You don't need enclosures for explosive gas mixtures any more than you need an enclosure to get a boom from nitro. (This is the diff between a brisant, like nitro, RDX, PETN, TNT, even NI3, etc and something that merely burns fast like black powder or smokeless, which indeed must be enclosed to explode.) PS: if a diesel vehicle is tailgating, acetylene will nicely stop its engine in a rather expensive way. Can you say predetonation? A pound of calcium carbide and some water makes a nice vehicle stopper BTW, the .mil has looked into it. The non-exploding fireball from a refinery or storage facility will be sufficient to destroy the facility, and make nice video, which is sufficient. If Allah smiles, maybe you get a big bang too. The trick is to do more than one place in the same day, so it can't be written off as an industrial accident.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 11:31 PM -0800 3/28/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Bob, stick with obfuscated economics and playing with boats.
Yeaaaaahhhh, I know. Think of it as me clearing the pipes for more stuff, or something. I haven't written much lately, and I'm starting to do that again. They just pissed me off, is all, and the thing wrote itself. So, now I feel better for my own bit of spontaneous combustion, which I probably shouldn't have sent here, since, of course, it wasn't topical. ;-). It's like two things I saw every day for several years apiece collided in meme-space, and I didn't even know I was even pissed off until I saw just the barest hint of those idiots being re-deified in the Globe Sunday morning. Whole decades of their sanctimony just became too much to abide anymore. Like nuclear power (or nuclear weapons), genetically modified foods, air travel, and lots of other progress, LNG is safe enough even in the worst-case scenario, and FUD-mongers like the Bulletin of the Atomic "Scientists" are the worst kind of Luddite charlatans. But I bet you figured that out, right? :-).
The non-exploding fireball from a refinery or storage facility will be sufficient to destroy the facility, and make nice video, which is sufficient. If Allah smiles, maybe you get a big bang too. The trick is to do more than one place in the same day, so it can't be written off as an industrial accident.
Like I said, you would need a full-on military operation to do the job, a battalion for the main tank, or a smart bomb and air-superiority for one tank on a ship, which would be kind of obvious. And, of course, if that's what happened, you'd have more problems than a whole bunch of flaming fart-gas lighting up the Tobin Bridge... Anyway, to paraphrase John Astin's character in "Night Court", I feel *muuch* better now, though I can't promise there won't be more later. :-). Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQGgt8MPxH8jf3ohaEQKrnQCgjOzwlyuCZRTivxeOggcK7GBqgiIAn1Z1 XoOV+pfZ2Yzl2Sj0Y94SBSp9 =Cffy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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Major Variola (ret) -
R. A. Hettinga