Thankfully, the poisoning didn't seem to cause any long term damage, though I'll need to be careful about it. After all, it will be a few years before I prestige again, which usually clears a lot of permanent damage. I did a far more measured approach to making the potential sodium azide again, but this time I carefully measured out what I could to see if stoichiometrically, the masses lined up with sodium azide. While I can't be that certain, since everything is reacting in excess ammonia, the numbers seemed to work out.

The bad news was that even when crystalized out of the ammonia, the sodium azide sample was actually quite resistive to exploding. I took four days preparing and testing sodium azide samples for testing. I had to heat it up to quite a high temperature before it would explode, and it wasn't very shock sensitive either. It clearly isn't going to work as the end product that I'm looking for, which means I'm going to need to start testing other metal azides for their properties. Thankfully, that shouldn't be as hard of a reaction, as long as I can actually make the metal salt precursors.

My plan is to dissolve different metals in nitric acid, then neutralize those solutions before dissolving sodium azide into that metal salt solution. In theory, the sodium in the sodium azide should exchange places with the other metal, creating a different metal azide, and sodium nitrate.

I decided to start off my testing with our more common metals: iron, copper, lead, and zinc. I carefully prepared each set of samples in the fume hood in a chilled water bath to prevent the reaction from boiling the nitric acid and sputtering it everywhere. Then I had to take quite a long time using sodium hydroxide to bring the pH of the solution closer to neutral. If I overdid it, I'd cause some of the metal nitrates to react and form metal hydroxides, which I don't want.

Without indicator fluid, I had to rely on the old system I used before, where I would take a small sample of fluid and drip it on calcium carbonate to see if it reacts. It's a brutally slow process. Thankfully, the process gets quicker when you're precise about inputs, since you can get a pretty good ballpark estimate for the amount of leftover acid that needs neutralized.

Over the course of eight days, I ran the experiments. The resultant iron and zinc compounds that were produced from reacting with sodium azide were duds, or at least seemed to be, not having great properties. The lead and copper, however, were resounding successes. They both precipitated out of the solution as a solid. The copper azide was perhaps a bit too energetic though, and I couldn't really isolate it in a dry form outside of liquid. The slightest touch would detonate it. The lead azide, by comparison was still quite sensitive, but was able to be isolated as a dry compound. It had to be air dried, however, as trying to heat it to dry it just led to it detonating after enough water was removed.

I couldn't really do further tests on the copper azide, as it was simply too sensitive. Tests for the lead azide though were resounding successes. Small impacts would detonate it, as would a small spark, or a bit of heat. If wet, it can be transported somewhat safely in small quantities as well. There are a few hurdles I'll have to jump through next though. First, I need to do some testing to see if lead azide can be useful for the purposes I have in mind, and just how much of it I'll need. Second, I'll have to optimize the production process for it, based on how much I need, if it works. Third, I'll have to design a shell capable of safely being handled that explodes on impact.

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The first sets of tests that I ran over the course of ten days make me think that the lead azide should be capable of functioning for the purpose of high explosive shells and potentially as primers for bullets. It does have to be handled with more care than even the nitroglycerin was, so it's quite dangerous overall. Plus I once again suffered some amount of poisoning from handling it in a somewhat unsafe manner. We shouldn't actually need much of it either. A very small amount is capable of acting as a detonator for our nitroglycerin based explosives.

It's so little that is necessary, in fact, that the current lab setup would probably keep up with the amount of shells we could make that utilizes it, though it would still be beneficial to make a proper facility for making it for health and safety reasons. Intermediates like sodium metal could also prove useful for other projects in the future as well. I will have to spend some amount of time to figure out how to make the lead azide into a more useful form, whether that is a blasting cap, or something else.

While I've been busy tinkering with designs for various different options for utilizing the lead azide for a month, we launched another ship, and have gotten word that the new model of tank is outperforming the old one significantly. The frontline has stalled, however. While a sizeable portion of the coast has been recovered, taking and holding the more mountainous sections has been nearly impossible. The good news is that with more of the coast back under dwarven control, there are fewer demon ships launching towards the elven continent. That has shifted mindsets from "How do we mitigate losses?" to "How can we continue pressing the advantage?"

The problem, however, is that a lot of the manpower has been spent during the years of war. So, while they're motivated to press their advantage, they don't really have the means to do so. In all likelihood, that advantage isn't going to come until I unveil the high explosive artillery. In combination with tanks and potential artillery, that is when I would expect the tide to turn.

I have been working on designing things to better utilize the lead azide, and we're making progress towards the eventual final product. I've decided on a type of directed blasting cap utilizing copper as the shell for a small amount of lead azide inside. The problem that I've been trying to solve for a little while now is how to make a safe and effective impact fuze. This has actually turned out to be just about as difficult of a problem as the making of the lead azide itself was.

What I've come up with is that the fuze itself needs to actually only arm after the shell is airborne, so that even if an accidental activation of the blasting cap happens, the rest of the explosive in the shell doesn't go off. The new shell design is actually a two component shell, with the fuze and the rest of the shell being in two parts. The fuze is inserted and locked in place just before firing. This way, if a fuze or shell goes bad for one reason or another, the whole thing isn't wasted.

In order to try to make the fuze work as intended, I've opted for two arming mechanisms utilizing springs and centrifugal forces. When the shell spins, it forces out a central piece that releases a pin that blocks any explosion from progressing down into the rest of the shell. Then, until the shell is finished accelerating out of the barrel, a spring prevents a pin from detonating the blasting cap. From there, only a strong jostling should cause the blasting cap to explode, usually caused by impact.

I've managed to get it to the point of having about a 95% success rate of detonating on impact, with no failures occurring during launch. The next thing I have to work on is the design for the high explosive round itself. It'll end up being quite a bit more complicated than a normal solid lead shell. Ideally, I probably pack lead balls around a central detonator, with a sheath around the outside. That way, when it detonates, you get maximal shrapnel in the nearby area, like being close range for the tank's shotguns.

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