Sword of Light: Humanoid Self-Propelled Artillery

Chapter 167 Underwater Explosions Are More Powerful
This discovery overjoyed Wang Gensheng. Perhaps in order to blow up the city wall or build fortifications, he actually brought ten boxes of TNT.

These ten boxes of TNT weigh two hundred kilograms.

With this TNT, blowing up ten small ships wouldn't be a problem. After all, the old fish don't have any large ships, only small ones, like gunboats.

Wang Gensheng immediately began experimenting. He was very direct and tied a Mark II grenade to a wooden box containing 20 kilograms of TNT.

Because the density of wood in a wooden box is much lower than that of water, and the density of TNT is only 1.5 times that of water, the wooden box containing TNT did not sink to the bottom but floated on the surface of the water.

This naturally saved Wang Gensheng some trouble, as he no longer needed to consider how to place the TNT explosive boxes at the bottom of the ship.

After all, all you need to do is tie stones to the box to make its overall density lower than that of water. Once you've submerged to the bottom of the ship, you can remove the stones from the box. This way, the box's buoyancy will be greater than that of water, and the TNT explosive box will stick to the bottom of the ship due to the buoyancy.

This eliminates the need to consider how to mount bombs on the bottom of ships where there are few load-bearing points.

Of course, Wang Gensheng planned to go to the port to blow up the ship himself for the first time. After all, the plan to blow up the ship was proposed by Wang Gensheng himself, so naturally, Wang Gensheng had to personally demonstrate it first.

However, during the operation, Wang Gensheng said to Duan Peng:
"Duan Peng, prepare a 500-meter-long hemp rope for me, the thin kind, I need it for stretching!"

Upon hearing this, Duan Peng couldn't help but say:
"Isn't 500 meters a bit long? I think 100 or 200 meters should be enough!"

Upon hearing Duan Peng's suggestion, Wang Gensheng immediately replied in an annoyed tone:
"You want me dead? This bomb explodes underwater, unlike it explodes on the surface. Exploding underwater amplifies its power!"

Wang Gensheng wasn't just making things up. When a bomb explodes underwater, the shockwave travels a wider range, so the kill radius is greater.

This is very different from the fact that the range of a bullet is greatly reduced underwater.

For example, in some police and gangster movies, you can often see the protagonist jumping into the water to escape pursuit, followed by a large group of pursuers firing at the water, and the protagonist escaping unscathed.

The main reason for this is that the water resistance is too great. After entering the water, the bullet will be rapidly slowed down and become almost harmless.

However, there is an interesting fact: another type of weapon—a grenade or other bomb—is many times more destructive when it explodes underwater than on the surface.

The main reason why grenades and bullets are two completely different methods is that bullets and grenades, or bombs, have a big difference: the shock wave they produce.

The power of a conventional bomb can be judged by the size of the shock wave it generates. The shock wave is caused by drastic changes in pressure, temperature, and density inside the bomb, and it depends on the outer shell material and the amount of explosive material inside.

Like ordinary waves, shock waves carry energy and propagate through a medium, so they can destroy objects or propel fragments forward.

However, its speed exceeded the speed of sound, so the sound of the explosion was actually a sonic boom caused by the shock wave.

When an organism comes into contact with a shock wave propagating through the air, the body actually reflects most of the force because the body's density is much higher than that of the fast-moving gas molecules.

However, some organs in a living organism contain gas, meaning that this gas, like air, will be compressed and expanded by the shock wave, resulting in an implosion within the organ. Therefore, when encountering a shock wave, it is often those gas-containing organs that rupture, such as the lungs, intestines, and ears. This process is similar to the situation depicted in the movie "Lion's Roar." But why is an underwater explosion more powerful?

The relationship lies in the fact that shock waves gradually lose energy during the process of compressing and expanding the propagation medium, such as air. Water is generally considered incompressible because it can only be compressed under extremely high pressure. This means that shock waves propagating in water will not lose energy.

In addition, water is much denser than air. Within the same blast radius, water is much heavier than air, which means that shock waves have difficulty moving water like air does, resulting in very little energy loss.

These two properties combined make water an excellent medium for the propagation of explosive shock waves, with very little energy loss.

To be precise, it's not that explosions in water are more powerful, but rather that their energy can travel over a wider and farther range.

For example, the same hand grenade releases basically the same amount of energy no matter where it explodes. However, when it is in the air, due to the rapid dissipation of the shock wave energy, the area affected by its destructive power is smaller.

Although it may seem counterintuitive that an explosion underwater is more powerful, many people have probably experienced it, they just may not have noticed.

A typical example is when we were kids playing with firecrackers. If we threw the firecrackers directly into a glass bottle, it was usually difficult to break the bottle. But if we added water, it was easy to shatter the glass bottle.

Wang Gensheng had done the same thing when he was a child, but what he blew up was not a glass bottle, but something much larger than a glass bottle, which was a water tank.

It's worth noting that Wang Gensheng lived in the countryside when he was a child, and at that time, not every household in the countryside had running water.

Since drawing water from a well isn't very convenient, people would use a water tank in the kitchen to store water. In this way, once the water tank was filled, it could last for many days.

When Wang Gensheng was a child, there were small boxes of crackers that cost five cents a box during the Chinese New Year.

So when Wang Gensheng dropped a grenade into the water vat, the bottom of the vat cracked.

Fortunately, no one was present at the time, and more importantly, Wang Gensheng's parents did not know that the firecracker had such great power.

They thought the water tank had cracked on its own! So Wang Gensheng escaped a beating with stir-fried meat.

At the time, Wang Gensheng couldn't understand it. It wasn't until the internet became more developed that he learned that water could enhance the power of firecrackers.

That is why Wang Gensheng asked Duan Peng to prepare a 500-meter-long rope for him.

After all, on land, a rope of one or two hundred meters is indeed enough for a distance of one or two hundred meters.

But Wang Gensheng would only feel safe at a distance of at least 500 meters in the water!

But Duan Peng didn't understand! So Duan Peng scratched his head, puzzled, and asked:
"Commander, didn't you teach us before that the power of bullets would decrease rapidly in water? And you even demonstrated it for us! You told us that if someone shoots into the water from the shore, we should immediately dive to a depth of at least one meter. Why is this bomb different?"

(End of this chapter)