A scary video about binary explosives...

[DU Ute]

If it is PETN - which is what someone at the FBI said it was yesterday - it's still a high explosive. A helluva lot more powerful that black powder or anything similar - that aren't high explosives at all. There is nothing "pedestrian" about PETN.

It still has close to only half the explosive power of C-4, and you'd have to use more than what you'd be able to fit in a pen to punch a hole in a plane, trust me on this one.

My real problem with this video is its use as a scare tactic. Asking if we should be worried, "vaporizing" a watermelon with a tiny drop of this explosive (it doesn't take much of an explosion to knock a watermelon off a post so it "vaporizes"), even giving a big scary number of what the detonation velocity of the stuff is (which in reality is nothing extraordinary). To the layperson it seems like you could set off a tiny drop of this stuff and take down a plane.

This ominous bullshit pisses me off. The fact of the matter is that this kind of explosive is no more powerful than any number of substances that have been readily available to these wackos for years, but the average person who views this video is going to think there is some new super-explosive out there that bad people are going to do horrible things with. These are the same kind of bullshit tactics employed by some people to push left wing environmentalist or other agendas that you probably hate. I agree that terrorism and the threat to airlines is very real and that we need to be vigilant, but scaring people with this kind of crap is wrong.

[statman]

Sorry, but you're just pulling stuff out of your ass pretending to know about explosives. PETN has an R.E. factor of 1.66, which means ounce for ounce, it's 1.66X as potent as TNT. C4's RE is only 1.34.

Soooo - PETN is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE POWERFUL than C4.

So just shut your pie-hole on this. Or just try to google something you obviously don't know anything about. Try starting with Wiki:

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_effectiveness_factor[/ame]

But you'll find the same numbers confirmed all over.

And as to the power of PETN - in WWII, bazooka shells had 6 - 8 ounces of PETN in them and could punch through 5 inches of steel armor (by the end of the war they were using smaller charges with optimized shape charges with the same impact as the larger rougher shape charges they used at the beginning of the war). I think you'll find that to be about 20 times thicker than the skin of an airliner - and of a stronger metal. It would take a very small amount of PETN to put a hole in an airliner. Perhaps not a pen - tough to make a shape charge out of that. But a 4 ounce pudding container with half the volume as a shaped charge of PETN would almost certainly be enough. After you've put a little hole in the plane, the failing pressure vessel that is the fuselage does the rest of the work.

[DU Ute]

Sorry, but you're just pulling stuff out of your ass pretending to know about explosives. PETN has an R.E. factor of 1.66, which means ounce for ounce, it's 1.66X as potent as TNT. C4's RE is only 1.34.

Soooo - PETN is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE POWERFUL than C4.

So just shut your pie-hole on this. Or just try to google something you obviously don't know anything about. Try starting with Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativ...iveness_factor

But you'll find the same numbers confirmed all over.

And as to the power of PETN - in WWII, bazooka shells had 6 - 8 ounces of PETN in them and could punch through 5 inches of steel armor (by the end of the war they were using smaller charges with optimized shape charges with the same impact as the larger rougher shape charges they used at the beginning of the war). I think you'll find that to be about 20 times thicker than the skin of an airliner - and of a stronger metal. It would take a very small amount of PETN to put a hole in an airliner. Perhaps not a pen - tough to make a shape charge out of that. But a 4 ounce pudding container with half the volume as a shaped charge of PETN would almost certainly be enough. After you've put a little hole in the plane, the failing pressure vessel that is the fuselage does the rest of the work.

You've probably never used any of this stuff, so I'll explain it to you. PETN is usually used as a booster in shape charges (the kind of charge you'd use to punch a hole through something) meaning it is used to help set off the primary charge in the direction you need it to go to punch through something. The reason for this is that while it is powerful, its detonation velocity is much lower than that of C-4. To effectively put a hole through something the point is to project something through the object and the faster you can get it moving the better. If I was going to make a homemade shape charge for something like this and I had to choose between using just one or the other I would take the C4 every time for this very reason.

You still haven't addressed my concern about your disingenuous fear mongering.

[statman]

If I was going to make a homemade shape charge for something like this and I had to choose between using just one or the other I would take the C4 every time for this very reason.

You still haven't addressed my concern about your disingenuous fear mongering.

"Homemade C-4? LOL! Good luck with that! Homemade PETN - Not nearly as difficult as you'd think. An amateur chemist could get all the stuff he needs pretty easily - and the process isn't very hard. Pentaerythritol and nitric & sulfuric acids are what you need. All are widely used industrial chemicals. Making this stuff would clearly be dangerous, but not that difficult for someone who's motivated. There's also a quick and dirty way to make the stuff that's not as efficient and a lot more dangerous, which is my guess as to what the NW 253 genius was trying to do in his seat.

And just so we're clear - C4 has a S L O W E R detonation velocity than PETN - ~8040 mps vs ~8400 mps - which is why C4's RE number is lower...

[Jeff Lebowski]

[DU Ute]

"Homemade C-4? LOL! Good luck with that! Homemade PETN - Not nearly as difficult as you'd think. An amateur chemist could get all the stuff he needs pretty easily - and the process isn't very hard. Pentaerythritol and nitric & sulfuric acids are what you need. All are widely used industrial chemicals. Making this stuff would clearly be dangerous, but not that difficult for someone who's motivated. There's also a quick and dirty way to make the stuff that's not as efficient and a lot more dangerous, which is my guess as to what the NW 253 genius was trying to do in his seat.

And just so we're clear - C4 has a S L O W E R detonation velocity than PETN - ~8040 mps vs ~8400 mps - which is why C4's RE number is lower...

How hard do you think it is to get your hands on some C4?

[DU Ute]

"Homemade C-4? LOL! Good luck with that! Homemade PETN - Not nearly as difficult as you'd think. An amateur chemist could get all the stuff he needs pretty easily - and the process isn't very hard. Pentaerythritol and nitric & sulfuric acids are what you need. All are widely used industrial chemicals. Making this stuff would clearly be dangerous, but not that difficult for someone who's motivated. There's also a quick and dirty way to make the stuff that's not as efficient and a lot more dangerous, which is my guess as to what the NW 253 genius was trying to do in his seat.

And just so we're clear - C4 has a S L O W E R detonation velocity than PETN - ~8040 mps vs ~8400 mps - which is why C4's RE number is lower...

The little video you showed says the detonation velocity of the crap they made was between 4297 mps and 6553 mps. Why are you trying to spread crap around that is only going to scare people more than they should be? This is the kind of crap people forward around that scares everyone's grandma and gets people paranoid for no good reason.

[statman]

How hard do you think it is to get your hands on some C4?

It's a lot harder to get C4 than it is to make PETN - the ingredients for PETN are all over the place - used in lots of different industrial processes - most of them having nothing to do with anything nefarious (as a lubricant is probably the biggest use). It'd be easy to steal a pound here or a pound there. Or just set up a fake company and order the stuff on the internet and have it shipped to you (google it, and you'll find a bunch of companies where you can just drop a couple pounds into your shopping cart and have it shipped to you - assuming you have a business to send it to). Which is why it's the explosive of choice used by the Islamoterrorists. They used it in Madrid, in some of the London bombs - and in the ones that fizzled two weeks after the big London attacks. Richard Ried - the shoe bomber - used it. This nutjob. There are probably others.

Sure, they'd love to always be able to use Symtex (which is actually half PETN) or C4, with proper detonators and fuses etc. But those are expensive and they have chemical markers in them that make them traceable. You can make this stuff in any apartment in any city in the world, with easy to get components, and relatively cheap equipment. Fizzles like what this guy had are a part of the game that al Qaeda has to figure in the equation, but fizzles are effective terror weapons as well - and they make US cabinet secretaries say ridiculously stupid things.

Now as to the video I posted - if you actually bother to go back and read my initial posts (a stretch, I know), I posted it inquiring if anyone knew more about the stuff. After a bit of research, I'm pretty sure that it's PETN made with a very rough, half-assed process (see my previous posts, or google PETN and red fuming nitric acid). It'll give you PETN that's pure enough to be a high explosive (meaning that it's got oxidizer and fuel in the molecule, and that the shock-wave of neighboring molecules exploding is all it takes to blow-up the next molecule. Pure PETN explodes with a shock-wave at 8400mps. This impure process yields (PETN + other stuff) that explodes at the slower rate (assuming that it is actually PETN they're making)). But it's dangerous as hell to mix it like that in sizable quantities (it'll blow up if you don't cool it down as the reaction runs), and no matter how you cool it, you won't get anything near pure PETN.

[DU Ute]

OMG! We're all screwed!!!

[statman]

OMG! We're all screwed!!!

Which is a more rational approach? Pretending that there is no threat, or recognizing it and finding ways to deal with it?

Pretending there isn't something to be worried about is idiotic and self-defeating. And if the panty-bomber is telling the truth, there are a bunch more just like him that are going to be trying to do the same thing.

But nah, you're right. PETN is harmless...