Posted by PebblesRox 3/31/2025
That kind of prose is why I love reading this chap's stuff.
Gold
Google search should not be returning an incorrect hallucination that sounds plausible ahead of the actual search results. It's so confidently wrong. Google is SO BAD NOW at searching for specific expressions.
At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature.
If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic.https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dioxygen%20difluoride
And others in the series:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=things%20won%27t%20work
https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...
High overlap with: (rocket fuels)
> Just to get the ball rolling, here’s a few of the more unusual things chlorine trifluoride is known to set fire to on contact: glass, sand, asbestos, rust, concrete, people, pyrex, cloth, and the dreams of children…
It’s linked in the article
You need a whole bunch of expertise to write about it. Gizmodo does not usually have this expertise, but its writers do usually recognize snappy writing that might go viral.
The book firmly establishes its tone with the first two pictures at the front: a successful rocket engine test and the remaining rubble of the same test stand after a failed test.
I have to wonder whether Clark's influence is a significant contributor to his writing style. It would be fun to ask him. They could, of course, have come to it independently.
They seem to model any chemical damage as "acid" and fire elementals aren't immune to acid so I would be inclined to say it would.
Nonetheless, chemists are obsessed with these because in theory you can engineer chemicals with completely implausible, or at the very least counter-intuitive, properties in a lab if you can figure out how to do it. It is the equivalent of extreme performance-engineering geekery in software. You do it because you can, not necessarily because you have a use case.
Topics like “theoretical limits of high explosive power” [0] and a lot of other things that will put you on a government list are something chemists definitely geek out on.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19700022572 https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1769958999279927787
They actually did build a test article and ran the engine a few times, enough to gather the data but it indeed ate the engine, and the concrete and the rocks and coated it all with explosive powder.
They did imagine coating the proposed launch complex with quartz but it quickly became obvious it was going to be way too expensive to actually build.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/vpu3fv/lockheed_s...
I'll always read and re-read his blog posts when they are posted here.
O3F2 is the one that if you add it to liquid oxygen, it makes hydrogen/oxygen combustion hypergolic.
Direct link: (.pdf) https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
O3F2 sounds like it'd be hypergolic with engineers. Nope.
Engineers. Asbestos. Sand.
Can confirm 'Nope'.
* the only way to move that fuel was in a refrigerated cistern... at a temp so low that the steel it was made of became brittle and cracked.
I think it's quoted in one of Derek Lowe's articles about fluorine compounds too.
Of course that breaks the idea of them incubating in humans, since their biochemistry would react explosively with ours, but that never made sense anyway.
that book is really good and has some interesting hidden treasures, like a couple of sentences about adding silicon oil to the fuel mixture to create a self-ablating film on the combustion chamber. I think some amateur bi-prop engine guys use that in their fuel setups. It's funny how the book ends after all that research and exotic chemicals with JP-1 and liquid O2 are still pretty much the best combination.