#this is pretty slapdash i may have to come back and tighten it up later...

[sauceystripes]

Dynamite, Contact Explosives, and WTF is All That Smoke?

In honor of his hero name, please have a few dynamite factoids, pre-packaged for fic-writing convenience and bc i’m bored.

The difference between things that are flammable and things that are explosive is a matter of the rate of expansion and of how much pressure is produced. All explosives are flammable, but relatively few flammable items make the cut to be considered explosive. Most of them burn without ever exploding (e.g. cellulose).

But beyond that, “low” explosives like black powder will deflagrate. Which is to say they’ll produce an explosion that expands pretty fast, but still comfortably subsonic. They’re like, one step up from being just plain flammable.

However, “high” explosives, of which nitroglycerin is the OG, will detonate. 

When something detonates, the explosion expands faster than the speed of sound and creates absurd overpressures that blow shit up so bad, it’s pretty much the only time anyone’s allowed to unironically use the word, “smithereens.” Basically, it destroys stuff, specifically, by generating crazy-devastating shockwaves. To put it another way, the scary thing about a traditional grenade is all the rapidly moving shrapnel that will insta-shred you to deadness. But the scary thing about NTG is the concussive blunt force that will literally rip your cells and tissues apart from each other in every direction. Seriously, think about getting smacked by something traveling faster than the speed of sound. Yeah, you pop like a balloon that’s then insta-cooked.

Other interesting things about NTG as an explosive: it is smokeless. Meaning all those clouds Bakugou creates when using his quirk probably aren’t smoke, they're dust. Specifically, they're the dust that used to be whatever solid object he just got done smithereen-ifying. irl NTG explosions often create huge dust clouds. That was literally its job in the U.S. during the 1800's: turning mountains into dust clouds. Instantly.

It is also a contact explosive. Meaning it doesn’t require a spark to go off (though a spark will do fine), it just needs an impact. So while it is very useful and versatile that Bakugou can generate the spark at the center of his palms to detonate his NTG, do bear in mind that he could also detonate it by… clapping his hands, snapping his fingers, or, my favorite, just slapping a bitch into literal oblivion. Bakugou: *slaps roof of car* Car: *kaboom*

It is also perfectly capable of detonating in the absence of oxygen. Explosions in space? More likely than you think. Explosions underwater? A’yup. All it requires is that the NTG doesn’t get diluted. Situations where that could happen would be something like a tank of still water where the NTG (which is weakly hydrophobic and denser than water) will settle and collect at the bottom. Then just tap the tank with a hammer. 

ofc that would be a pretty specific instance. Something more practical: Bakugou has those little grenade containers he wears at his belt? I figure he’s probably got some stabilizing material in them (such stabilizer materials are collectively referred to as “dope,” btw, which I find hilarious). But anyway, if Bakugou had one of those little containers (or just any container), filled with NTG minus the dope, he could just smack it against a rock underwater, and it’d go off just fine……Where the explosion would then propagate even faster than it does through air (bc water is just a bitch like that; waves of all kinds will propegate through water much more readily than through air). Which means that whatever character was in the water might be partially insulated from the heat, however the force impacting them would actually be worse than above water. That character would get their insides full-on liquefied at what might otherwise have been a safe distance……..btw, Bakugou’s hand would also be similarly liquefied except for the canonical fact that he is mysteriously physics-defyingly impervious to his own explosions, which I will not question (just like how I don’t question the way he manages to control his explosions’ directionality… or what fuel is Todoroki’s fire supposed to be burning? sshshhhhh).

Aaaaand I think that’s enough. Stay tuned for next time where we go into medical uses of NTG, whether Bakugou could save your ass during a heart attack (yeah, probably), and how Bakugou’s quirk actually has way more in common with Mina’s than it does with Todoroki’s.