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[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

The liquid at room tempurate metals I would assume



Also you are comparing .50 to .50. And being used on armored vehicles. Once again I'm meaning to talk about smaller rounds designed for non-armored targets (hence the easily accessible parts, no need for air piercing when the bullet can hit directly. And while an explosive round would be much more USEFULL the acid rounds would be (maybe?) CHEAPER. Going with price and fun over practicality.
Also this argument is pointless and I think we should stop arguing because of course any sain person would agree to use a military gear explosive round for targeting vehicles/machinery over a cheap small round filled with acid


Edit: the acid bullets being cheaper is under assumption of being mass produced like the explosive round

[wierd]

Magnesium vapor would ignite in atmosphere as well.

Boiling zinc would be highly toxic.

An alternative is a "Soft kill" weapon that would be mostly benign.  Say, something that is designed to clog up the air filter on the intake system, and thus denying the fuel in the engine any oxygen with which to be burned, killing the engine by running it too rich.

Volatized parafin wax, or other heavy hydrocarbon would be a good candidate.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I was attempting to suggest mercury when I mentioned metal that is liquid at room tempurature...

[wierd]

Geneva convention. Mercury vapor is HIGHLY, HIGHLY toxic.

[Frumple]

Little bit more arguing :V

Seriously though, if it's not armored there's no real need for anything fancy. Just shoot it until it stops working, which really don't take all that much at all. They do appear to have tried mercury bullets, but reports on its effect are... apparently fairly widely varied, and... somehow... linked to JFK assassination conspiracy theories. Something about exploding heads (and apparently ignoring that's more or less the result of any bullet over a certain size hitting someone in the head).

Some kind of fume grenade does sound like it could be among the better options, though, sure, if you can't just shoot it or blow it up. Only rub there is that, as isp noted, anything that can do anything to the inner workings of a machine is going to do something significantly more horrendous to the inner workings of a person And get inside much the same, of course.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Tired me is just laying here imagining metal vapor clouds

[wierd]

The HCl vapor grenade would be the cheapest and easiest to "Ghetto-fab" of these munitions.  It would to absolutely HORRIBLE things to unprotected humans and animals-- but it would also permanently destroy engines that were operating within the resulting fume cloud.

Said cloud would be colorless and invisible, but not odorless. (and you would DEFINITELY know if you stumbled into one!) Rapid production of pure HCl gas can be accomlished with metal catalysts and heat in the presence of sufficiently dense chloride salts. Suitable catalyst can be obtained from old catalytic converters. (which is why I say the device is easily ghetto-fabbed)

Hydrochloric acid is actually a gas that has been dissolved into the water, in much the same way that carbolic acid is carbon dioxide dissolved in water. PURE gas would be highly hygroscopic, and would be pulled into any mucous membrane exposed to it, causing instant free radical deterioration of the tissue. (In other words, concentrated pure gas would destroy lungs and eyeballs in seconds.) When sucked into an operating vehicle, the gas would combine with the trace quantities of water vapor produced by the combustion of the engine's fuel. producing liquid HCL solution inside the engine's calendars and exhaust system, which would continue to corrode and damage the engine even after the vehicle drove out of the cloud.  It would shred valves and valvestems, rapidly rust holes in the exhaust system, and pit/corrode the calendar walls in short order.

The materials needed to construct such a device would be very easy to source. Most of the chemicals found in the pool aisle at walmart would be suitable chloride sources.


Again, Geneva convetion violation, in great big neon letters.  The Geneva convention ban on chemical weapons came about after WW1, when molecular chlorine gas was deployed.

Concentrated HCl vapor would be right up there in line with molecular chlorine.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Let's not get too descriptive on actually making these things at home. I'm not sure it's entirely legal to talk about

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I had to work with the stuff in rather large quantities for a school experiment. Made a makeshift splash shield/body cover out of thick rubber ponchos, kitchen gloves, chemical filter mask, and goggles.
Kept me pretty safe

[wierd]

You didn't do it right. You are supposed to swirl the jug around so that it vortex drains. Then it only takes about 3 to 5 seconds to empty. (as opposed to nearly a full minute when "glugging")


In the case of the chemical fume grenade, I would personally use the sodium perchlorate tablets as the feedstock, crush them up into a fine powder mixed with charcoal or soot, underneath a layer of thermite activator. The device is not intended to spill thermite out-- it would only need a very small amount of the stuff to set off the "cooking" of the reactants. The resulting fume would then pass through the cataylst on the way out of the grenade, which would help to convert the racemic mix of chloro carbons produced into carbon dioxide, water vapor, and HCl vapor in copious quantities.

There is significant danger in that the device may simply explode instead of properly vent gas though. Sugar may be a better choice than carbon powder.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Really? I just poured mine at an angle so air could still move in and it poured out in about 5 or 6 seconds. (Poured similar the way one would pour soda, trying to keep it from splashing and fizzing too much)

[iceball3]

To clarify on the person suggesting acid bullets: The simple fact of the matter is that unless you can provide a specific example otherwise, incendiary and explosive rounds are simply better application than acid round for what you suggest. Even if the mechanism in question is not resistant enough to justify explosive rounds, you could just... Shoot it directly, using normal ammunition.
If you do not want to disturb it by just kinetics, then you're probably just better off using a paintball gun with paintballs filled with either some kind of metal solvent that can be bound in a shell that resists it one way or another (might not exist, it's hard to look up that specifically), or maybe a paintball filled with epoxy resin to jam stuff up. Paintball style guns just typically tend to be significantly better for application liquids on to  something at a range in discrete quantities than normal firearms. And on top of that, positing the question of "acid" is almost meaningless, as it is more just a general scale of a vast quantity of materials that react differently to different things. If you want to posit the question on some kind of "melty damagy" chemical agent, the word you might want to use is "Solvent" in this case.

[martinuzz]

The polymer department of my town's technical university has made a breakthrough in researching polymers that can be commanded to expand or shrink, when triggered by photons or electric stimuli.

Practicable application in the near future will include "mobile coatings", "touchscreens that you can feel (braille touchscreens anyone?)", and "finely adjustable robot fingers"

[miauw62]

Maybe we could get hard soft keyboards...

[Dutrius]

I'm a bit late to the party here, but there's another liquid metal at room temperature: NaK.

Problem is, it's an alloy of sodium and potassium and thus hilariously reactive in air and water.